I’ve spent this week putting the finishing touches on our keyword research guide (which will most likely be available–both to purchase and for Premium Members–on Monday). This afternoon I had the pleasure of speaking with Bill Tancer from Hitwise. Bill took me on a walkthrough of Hitwise’s Competitive Intelligence tools, which he referred to as their “flagship tool” (we’re featuring their Keyword Intelligence tool, which Bill said was more like their “entry level tool,” in our keyword research guide).
I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been living and breathing keyword research tools for the past month, but Bill’s tour of Hitwise’s features was the most interesting walkthrough I’ve been on for a product demo. (Okay Bill, I said it–where’s my puppy?)
Anyway, Hitwise offers a lot of pretty compelling data. You can generate various reports on a website, an industry, or a search term. In this example, I entered www.amazon.com and then changed the drop-down menu to “search terms” to see which keywords/phrases have brought searches onto their site:
Amazon’s search term referrers ending 2/24/07
Clicking on one of these terms (e.g. “books”) then shows a detailed analysis of that term for the four weeks ending 2/24/07, including the top ten websites that received the most traffic from the search “books,” the most popular search terms containing “books,” the search engine share for that query, and the industry traffic share:
Hitwise search term analysis for the term “books”
You can also compare search terms, Google Trends-style, on a chart to see their relative popularity. Here, I compared “prom dresses” (which Bill confessed to having an unnatural obsession with [from a purely search-related perspective, of course…at least I hope so]) to “wedding dresses” over the past month and a half:
Eat taffeta, wedding dresses!
This is all Bill was able to show me, and I didn’t get a chance to play around with Hitwise much more than that (stupid Rand and his stupid “tasks”). There’s a load of other stuff to check out, such as Search Term Suggestions, Search Term Analysis, and Search Term Gap Analysis, Find Websites by Keyword, Domain Name, or Demographic Composition, and there are plenty of charts to drool over. It would be extremely easy (and dangerous) to get addicted to playing with Hitwise for virtually any sort of competitive analysis comparison.
Now for the cons…as Rand griped, Hitwise doesn’t report any hard data–everything is available for a relative comparison. There is no “such and such term had X number of searches, compared to so and so term, which had Y number of searches.” This frustrates my Yellow Shoe’d Employer because he knows Hitwise has the data available, so why no sharesies?
A second drawback to Hitwise is that (I’ll channel my inner Dave Naylor here) it’s fookin’ expensive, yeah! Though there’s no price listed on their site (they instead ask that you contact them to purchase a package), Rand told me that a year’s membership costs around a hefty $20k. That’s a lot of money to shell out for no hard data, right?
Though Hitwise costs about half my salary, it’s a pretty damn cool program to use for competitive analysis. While it’s obviously out of the question for us meager Mozzers (hey, maybe in a couple years we could afford it…), I’m sure that the companies who can afford to shell out the coinage to use it are getting their money’s worth.
(By the way, thanks a lot to Bill for taking me through the walkthrough [check out ilovedata.com to read Hitwise’s blog], and thanks to Rand for turning me into a stats and charts nerd. If I were in junior high, I’d be giving myself a wedgie right now : / )
MORE FROM RAND: I’d add that we, at SEOmoz, had access to a Hitwise account through a client for about a year (4-5 months ago). I frequently used the data to provide insight into several questions about competitive intelligence, relative keyword volume, search volume and demographics. The data is remarkably valuable and useful if you’re a site getting 2-3 million or more visitors each month, and considerably less useful below that (likewise, analyzing competitors smaller than those sizes is also tough).
I wouldn’t recommend against buying it, but I would recommend that you identify valuable uses for the data before you make a purchase. I have no doubt that Bill’s team would be happy to give you a demo 🙂
