What sort of changes did a new month bring? We took a look at the fastest growing (and declining) terms since last month to get a better idea of the trend in consumer search interest.

Findings:

• As the April 16th deadline approaches, taxes are still high interest!
• What is the final stimulus package and what does it mean for me?
• Rihanna and Chris Brown were the focus of celebrity gossip.
• Many more people using Hulu to stream TV and video content.

Findings:

• Circuit City filed for bankruptcy and has been in liquidation phase. Shoppers can no longer purchase items online.
• Superbowl 43 is over and Roethlisburger carried the Steelers to victory.
• Concern of the peanut butter recall has dwindled.

January search term biggest movers are now live on the Compete Data Hub! What sort of changes did a new month bring? We took a look at the fastest growing and declining terms since last month to get a better idea of the trend in consumer search interest.

Growing Term Highlights:

• Tax year 2008 is over and April is approaching quickly – get your taxes done!
• Obama assumes office as the 44th President of the US
• 98 Million people tuned in to watch Superbowl 43 – to see Ben Roethlisburger v Kurt Warner, the always exciting commercials, or maybe just the Springsteen halftime show

Declining Term Highlights:

• The mad dash of Christmas shopping is over, start saving for next year
• The Kings of Leon topped charts and announced tour dates to round out 2008, but slipped in January
• Interest in Marley & Me, starring Jennifer Aniston, is trailing along with its box office sales

Check out the Compete Data Hub for complete lists of the top 20 fastest growing (and declining) terms.

Formula. Diapers. Clothing. Nursery Items. Car Seats. Strollers.

When I think of a high value market segments, one that comes to mind is young and expecting mothers. Making new purchase decisions on these items and more, young and expecting mothers are the target consumers of many baby product companies. If I were an online brand marketer for Johnson and Johnson (makers of the always popular Johnson’s Baby Shampoo), I would be interested in knowing where I can advertise to most effectively reach this target group.

The current industry standard approach is a contextual ad campaign. A typical contextual ad campaign matches site content with target group interests. Under this approach, known sites with baby- or mom-focused content would be the appropriate ad placement location. Examples of these locations could be momstoday.com or singlemom.com. Unfortunately, this is speculative and offers a limited scope. After all, young and expecting mothers don’t spend ALL of their online time at these very segmented sites. Behavior Match is Compete’s new approach to this challenge of matching target consumers with effective online media buys among all sites they visit. Using Compete’s Behavior Match product suite, we can drill down to online properties that have a greater than average saturation of young and expecting mothers, not just the contextually relevant sites.

A Behavior Match Buyer report highlights all websites that are visited by young and expecting mothers, indexed against the chance of finding this behavioral segment on the average site across the internet. To run this report, Compete has identified 1,000,000 online consumers in the month of January, 2008 as young and expecting mothers.

*Read as “In the month of January, 809,835 young and expecting mothers visited the Yahoo! Domain. Yahoo! Scores a 98, indexed against the average composition of young and expecting mothers, or just under the internet average (100).”

Top 10 Domain Findings:

• The largest internet properties have the highest reach among young and expecting mothers.
• These domains index very close to average; this is oftentimes true because of their sheer size. i.e. Who doesn’t use Yahoo!?
• Among this list, aol.com is the best advertising opportunity for Johnson and Johnson to reach young and expecting mothers (wikipedia.org does not accept advertising).

The focus of this report is the torso sites on the internet (50,000 to 500,000 monthly unique visitors) that have a high concentration of young and expecting mothers.

*Read as “In the month of January, 31,000 young and expecting mothers visited kidprintables.com. Kidprintables scores a 8,895, indexed against the average composition of young and expecting mothers.”

Torso Domain Findings:

• While these internet properties have lower scope, on a per impression basis they much more effectively reach the target segment.
• A campaign focused across many torso domains has the same reach opportunity as a larger internet property.
• A trend among these sites is that they are focused on work from home / internet jobs.

Compete offers another product in the Behavior Match product suite focused on large site segmentation. Behavior Match In-Site segments the larger internet properites to take advantage of their large scope while still effectively targeting young and expecting mothers.

This table takes a comparitive look at the performance of top subdomains on yahoo.com and msn.com during the month of January 2008 at reaching young and expecting mothers.

In-Site Findings (yahoo.com and msn.com):

• On a per impression basis, many MSN channels more effectively reach young and expecting mothers than similar Yahoo! channels.
• Top performing channels for Johnson and Johnson to focus on with their ad campaign include Real Estate, Health, and TV.
• Channels that less effectively reach the young and expecting mother segment are Help, Astrology, and Autos.

Takeaways:

• Contextual placement alone is outdated. Similar properties across two top portals don’t even show the same reach among the target segment.
• Targeted advertising space doesn’t have to be expensive. Matching highly effective advertising opportunities from Behavior Match with those offering low CPM saves $$!
• Bargaining with top portals is possible. Fight for the placement on the health channel.
• This product is EASY. No more wrapping your head around fancy targeting schema.

Checking the “deal of the day” at woot.com has become part of my morning routine akin to satisfying my caffeine dependency. Piggybacking on the ebay phenomenon, woot.com takes advantage of the desire to buy when there is limited stock/time. Ironically, “bags o’ crap” are the most sought after item for sale on woot. The concept of the site is simple, but it’s easy to get hooked.

In September 2007, woot.com was trafficked by over 580,000 US consumers, having realized strong growth over the summer since its deal with Yahoo! As part of the agreement, Woot will offer an offer an exclusive deal of the day to Yahoo Shopping visitors on the frontpage.

Having tasted success with Woot Wine (which doesn’t deliver to Massachusetts!!!), Woot has also begun to offer a specialized “deal of the day” on Woot Shirt. While wine.woot.com and shirt.woot.com aren’t advertised on the Woot homepage, they still managed to attract 15% and 25% of woot.com’s domain visitors respectively.

Taking advantage of the Compete Search Analytics engine, I began to notice a trend in the top brand keyword searches leading to woot.com. Not a surprise to me that camera and mp3 player brands, and Roomba (the vacuum cleaning robot) help make up the top 10.

I don’t know if it’s the bags o’ crap or the roombas or just the site in general, but they’ve got me hooked.

Buy or wait? Is there a chance if I postpone my purchase that the ticket price will decrease? If only there were a way to take the guesswork out of this decision… Farecast.com (a travel Meta-Search site on steroids) claims to have the answer to this question plaguing online travel shoppers. Users select their desired departure/destination/dates combination and just as on other Meta-Search sites, Farecast technology scrapes information from airline (and online travel agency) websites across the internet, displaying it conveniently in one location.

Continue reading “Farecast: Taking Guesswork Out of Online Travel” »

My family tree doesn’t allow me to claim Irish heritage for 364 days of the year, but like many other Americans on March 17th, I celebrate. Historically St. Patrick’s Day signifies the death of St. Patrick, the Patron Saint of Ireland. Today however, most view St. Patrick’s Day as a day to wear green clothing, attend parades and binge drink.

In case you weren’t aware of its historical significance, browse one of the many sites on the web that will spell it out, such as st-patricks-day.com. Compete data shows that visitation to this site has reached a high point for every year in March as the topic of St. Patrick’s Day piques interest. I came to wonder if there was a correlation between the arrival of St. Patrick’s Day and online research of other aspects of the day.

As our society becomes more tech savvy, St. Patrick’s Day Parade organizers turn to the internet as a medium to relay route, time, and offerings information. The upward first quarter monthly trend among 20 top parade websites signals the arrival of St. Patrick’s Day. Increasing year over year trends (44% for visitation in February 2007 compared to February 2006) quantify the increased use of the internet for parade research.

How does the liquid staple of the holiday fare online? Increased consumption of alcohol is inherent in the celebration of this holiday.

Interestingly, there is not a measurable correlation between online alcohol researchers and those researching parade websites during the same month. This represents a lost opportunity for alcohol advertisers to reach in-market drinkers. While safety might be an issue of relevance, alcohol advertisers should look to parade websites as a medium to reach in-market drinkers. Increased exposure to alcohol branding during the parade research period could be an influence that might fill many pint glasses through the St. Patrick’s Day celebration. Cheers!