Has anyone used Hitwise for business research, and if so, how did you find it. We would like to deploy this service, but wondered if it was more consumer based research?

On 17:32:09 24 January 2008 NatalieBroome wrote:

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....