Hitwise Search Intelligence Tool: Data on Steroids - Different Ways to Look at the Data
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The video divides the suite’s tools into seven sections, though, as Christine Churchill notes, they “are well integrated and intuitively linked.” It all starts with a rankings tool that gives you an overview of the forest, so to speak. The tool lists the most popular sites in more than 160 industry categories, starting with a display of the top 20 sites and their share of the market for the most recent week. You can display the full list, which might show hundreds of sites.
Naturally this is not a static tool. You can use calendar drop-downs to change the date and time range covered. You can also build your own industry by clicking on check boxes next to sites and saving them in a custom category for analysis. It looks like a great way to keep track of a group of particular competitors.
The charting feature is great for making comparisons; most marketers will want to use it for comparing the traffic of two or more web sites (up to 10). You can compare them based on different metrics over a period of time long enough to pick out seasonal trends. You can also compare different keywords. Just put in the data and the tool displays a very clear chart with many points labeled. If you’re wondering why you’re seeing a certain spike in the chart, you can hover your mouse over the spike (as Churchill describes doing) and investigate events that can be tracked on the web that might have caused the spike (such as mentions in the press, product releases, etc.). You can even check into where the traffic came from by looking at the site’s clickstream for that time period. Some of this reminds me of a recent Google beta called Google Trends, which I reviewed some time ago for SEO Chat.
Speaking of clickstreams, the clickstream tool comes with enough possibilities to make your head spin. The idea is deceptively simple: it tells you where web traffic is coming from for a particular site or industry, and then where it goes after it leaves the site. Think about what this means though: finding out where people are coming from might help with choosing partners, and finding out where they’re going could give you a clue as to whether you’ve served their needs (hint: if you see a competitor looming high in this part of the clickstream data, you might need to rethink a few things).
As Churchill notes, “this is not information you can get from your own logs.” Another point worth keeping in mind is that the tool can show you clickstream data not just for your site, but for your competitor’s, so you can see where their traffic is coming from and going to as well. It can give you “an insightful peek into how competitors are getting traffic, where they are losing it, and how their flow patterns compare with yours,” explained Churchill.
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