Hitwise Search Intelligence Tool: Data on Steroids
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It’s been described as being “like nosing around in the competition’s trash…only it’s easier (and legal).” Hitwise’s Search Intelligence Tool 4.0 offers some important improvements over earlier versions. But all that functionality comes at a price.
First, let me give you a disclaimer on this review: I didn’t have a chance to use the tool myself, and its $50,000 to $60,000 yearly subscription fee (which can scale down if you want to have fewer people able to use it at your company, a smaller number of categories covered, etc.) is enough to make anyone pause. But if you’ve ever wondered what the ultimate SEO tool would look like, this can’t be too far off.
Fortunately, Hitwise provides a five-minute video on its web site that gives a very good description of Search Intelligence. It includes an audio element, so make sure your speakers are turned on. The video reminds you to do so before it starts, and gives you a button to click to start it once you turn them on. The video is both concise and comprehensive without being overproduced. I especially liked that it was divided into smaller pieces that covered each part of the product separately, which the user could click on if he or she wanted to jump around and look at certain specific features (it still played automatically in a specific order if you chose not to do this).
As Christine Churchill points out in her intensive review of the Search Intelligence Tool, it’s really a suite rather than a single tool. But I’m getting ahead of myself. In case you’re not familiar with the company, Hitwise has been around since 1997, providing a network-based approach to Internet measurement. Hitwise’s founders wanted to be able to report on more than just the top web sites and monitor the online behavior of more than a relatively small number of people; they knew that kind of information would be much more useful to marketers than what was available at the time.
According to its web site, Hitwise “captures the anonymous online usage, search, and conversion behavior of 25 million Internet users.” It offers a variety of products, and its data and releases are regularly quoted in the press when questions of Internet usage come up. And it’s no wonder; the company covers more than 800,000 businesses across over 160 different industries. With that kind of data set to draw from, you’d expect the Search Intelligence tool to deliver something special.
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