Hi Sandy

Looks like you work for Edinburgh Woollen Mill? So retail with quite a broad market? But you don't appear to sell online? Just trying to figure out how valuable Hitwise might be to you (or not) - how do you value your web traffic?

We've found Hitwise not to be that useful for our own purposes but we're a B2B niche - their data sample means they're best typically for higher volume B2C sites. In particular they are useful for search marketing intelligence + 'market share' / 'share of voice' type data.

When you say 'help us profile the market', what exactly do you want? Data on how many customers you might realistically attract? Where they are online and how they shop etc? Is it to feed into your business planning? (Hitwise certainly used to do one-off reports which were a lot cheaper than £17k).

Ashley Friedlein
CEO
E-consultancy.com

Although there the information offered seems to be similar, I think it's over simplifying to say that ALEXA does pretty much the same thing as Hitwise.

Leaving aside the methods by which they obtain their data and which mean that their information will be of lower relevance in a general consumer market such as this, Alexa only offer very simple reporting.

Hitwise offer a very comprehensive suite of reports. As Sanjit says, they also have Account Managers to assist. 'Assist' is an under-statement in my experience. Those managers offer a wealth of proactive advice and suggestions about how to interpret the information and even what actions you might consider. You pay a lot, but you get a lot. They're really into this subject.

Alexa is free, and it's a great tool which I would recommend. But I don't think it is really even a direct competitor with Hitwise -- the difference between them is too great.

The entry price may seem steep, but I recommend that you ask around and try to get some feedback from users of Hitwise. Try to find some ex-users who didn't think it worth the fee as well, of course.

Tim

On 09:41:46 22 January 2008 SanjitChudha wrote:

Hitwise are good (in addition you get Mosaic profiling of site users and an Account Manager to assist with deeper level reports and analysis).   However, if you're after something free that does pretty much the same try ALEXA.

On 09:32:29 21 January 2008 Smiler05 wrote:

My company is embarking on a major ecommerce initiative and it was suggested Hitwise could help us profile the market. I already get the basic emails from them but when I enquired about an accont I was shocked to be told it would cost £17k - just for access to their service.

Maybe I am not clear on what they do - is this worth it? I think I would rather spend that cash on somethiing useful, like advertising or a whole email marketing system (and a million emails), you know, something that actually works for us.

Is there any other Hitwise like resources I can still get data from but not pay an arm, a leg and a kidney for?

Cheers

Hi Sandy

Apologies. You know that your profile is on public view at http://www.e-consultancy.com/account/profile-78274/smiler05.html?  I just clicked on the 'view profile' link against your name in your post. I'm not revealing anything that anyone else can't already see.

If I Google Sandy Miller in the UK your profile on this site comes up on the first page.

We don't publish anything that the user hasn't given us permission to do. When you registered you went through a form which had your details and an option to 'Show Public' or not, which is off by default. I notice, for example, that your e-mail address is not shown public (very sensible) though I, of course, have access to that but would never publish it.

You can change the 'visibility' of your profile via http://www.e-consultancy.com/account/modifyprofile.asp - if you want to remain anonymous then I would uncheck all the 'Show Profile' boxes.

Regards

Ashley Friedlein
CEO
E-consultancy.com

Thank you. I understand that I made a mistake, I never realised my details were viewable elsewhere. So apologies too.

!

On 09:23:25 23 January 2008 Ashley wrote:

Hi Sandy

Apologies.

From our use of Hitwise so far we have found it invaluable for:

• Profiling our market in terms of size, traffic to competitor sites and subsets of our industry (travel)
• Identifying new partnerships opportunities (via clickstream)
• Evaluating our share of the paid search and organic search market and new opportunities to exploit
• Other options such as mosaic profiling are additional costs so I haven't used these.

In terms of competition, Alexa isn't very accurate (based on their stats versus our analytics) and doesn't even begin to offer the level of detail that Hitwise does. I couldn't find anything else in the marketplace that could provide us with this information so Hitwise is the obvious solution.

In terms of whether it is worth the money, you are going to need to use it regularly to make it worth your while. I know previous colleagues and friends that have had Hitwise in the past and never quite got round to using it! This is pretty easy to do, it depends on how proactive you are.

If you are planning to use it as part of a major e-commerce initiative, I'd say it would be worth purchasing. However, I would consider how much 'market profiling' you can actually undertake using the web as a start, given your company is yet to transact online. If you want to identify online competitors in your marketplace, what their proposition is, what search terms they bid on, how well they perform for SEO and their estimated size in the online arena, I think you would be able to gauge this initially from having a hunt around Google.

I guess it depends how much detail you require....