uk-netmarketing Archive (2011-2015)

hi, Alison, I'm a month late on this, but for the 'is Hitwise worth it?'
question: It depends on what you're going to do with it.

I can think of 3 people I've worked with over the last few years who have
*genuinely* used it to more than pay for itself several times over. They
each did roughly the same thing:

   1. Understood where they stood in the market, both at a top level and
   'by channel'.
   2. Reverse engineered each channel for their competitors.
   3. Worked at a very tactical level to mirror the areas their competitors
   were having success, and then went over and above that.

In 2 of the cases these were smaller businesses in their market who were
wanting to rapidly grow; in the 3rd case it was a well established
business, underperforming online, who had a new ecom director.

*And the quick argument against:
*

   - There are lots of free, or much cheaper tools in the market that do
   parts of what hitwise do.
   - Hitwise data is (I find) a bit more shakey than it once was (and it
   was never all that good, but still very, very useful). The 'slightly less
   useful' bit is due to 2 things:
      - Mobile growth, and users/journeys therefore being fragmented much
      more than they were.
      - Multi-tab browsing on desktop. (eg. if users are browsing with 4 or
      5 tabs at once, the 'upstream' or 'downstream' data in Hitwise
will be far
      less meaningful).
   - From people I know who use Hitwise, lots say they preferred the UI as
   it used to be.

The most important thing with Hitwise, which for whatever reason they don't
seem to push, is you need to have a process to sit around it.

*Example alternatives:*

   - For 'seo' - majesticseo, moz.com and lots of others allow you to do
   backlink analysis, etc. Google Analytics now has some tools for that for
   your own site (albeit a bit rudimentary).
   - For 'seo & ppc' - Hydra offers some interesting tools for
   understanding when/where competitors are visible in PPC *and* organic
   search, how you stack up against that, where there are pockets of keywords
   you're missing, etc.
   - For 'social' - you can often build your own simple tools for stuff
   like this, but I find SocialBro (bad name, great tool) useful -
   particularly for understanding competitors' use of twitter, their follower
   makeup, etc.

If you have time, there's lots of ad-hoc poking around you can do too.
Here's an example:

   - The buyagift twitter account retweeted a tweet from 'dealcloud'
   yesterday.
   - I can see that dealcloud has less than 1000 followers on twitter (ie.
   I can instantly get an idea of its scale)
   - If the dealcloud account had a much larger number of followers, I
   might double-check that authenticity using 'fakers.statuspeople.com' or
   similar.
   - The tweet contained a bitly link. I can therefore see how many people
   clicked that link, where they came from geographically, etc.
   - In this case, the numbers are tiny: https://bitly.com/11k50hf+
   - And from there that the bitly link was shortened by 'Invitation
   Digital'. That leads me down 2 paths:
      1. I can see what else Invitation Digital is working on, and what
      they've shared to Twitter: https://bitly.com/u/invitationdigital .
      (and, if I like, I could take a quick look at the numbers there & see
      whether it's worth me doing anything with dealcloud)
      2. I can see this seems to be them:
      http://www.invitationdigital.co.uk/ . (and poking around a bit, I can
      see that's the company that seem to run vouchercloud).

If I work through a few more of your tweets, I can get an idea of how much
activity there is around your twitter account, maybe if you use any
agencies to help out with social media, etc. I could then could move on to
Facebook, etc.

If I'm a competitor, I can use that information to figure out whether it's
worth following similar tactics to you (or to any of the others in your
competitor group).

*Summary:*

   1. Hitwise can be useful if you're playing catchup/wanting to leap ahead
   of competitors.
   2. You have to have a process for it to be any use other than simply
   'information'.
   3. There are lots of alternative tools/methods for getting very vaguely
   similar 'competitive insights' .


Hope something here's useful!

dan


--
dan barker
http://www.barker.dj
http://www.linkedin.com/in/djbarker
+44 (0)7855 953 942




On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 12:43 PM, Alison Wade <Alison.Wade at buyagift.co.uk>wrote:

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