Hitwise Launches New and Returning Visitors Data

October 30, 2007; 04:47 AM

NEW YORK, NY -- Hitwise, the leading online competitive intelligence service, announces the launch of a new Clickstream report - New and Returning Visitors. This new data is invaluable for understanding the percentage of new and repeat traffic a website receives, which sources of traffic provide the greatest volumes of each type of visitor and where new and returning visitors go after visiting a website.

Utilizing this data allows marketers to analyze a competitor’s audience in terms of new and repeat traffic and further understand the strategy and effectiveness of competitive marketing programs. For example, New and Returning Visitors data can help determine if competitors are more focused on traffic-driving campaigns or retaining existing visitors. In addition, New and Returning Visitors allows marketers to:

• Gauge the effectiveness of online partners, such as search engines and other traffic- driving websites, like social networking sites, in driving traffic to a website.
• Identify where New or Returning Visitors go after visiting your own website for insights on how to stop churn.

“We use the New and Returning Visitor report to examine our large upstream sites and we adjust our marketing messages accordingly,” said Gary Silverstein, senior director of online marketing and advertising, Lending Tree. “We are a fast-paced, test-and-learn online direct marketing company and this new report is another Hitwise tool that provides us valuable data for optimizing our marketing strategy.”

“The Hitwise New and Returning Visitors reports are a great way for online marketers to get smarter about online partnerships, and ultimately, understand the dynamics of customer churn,” said Chris Maher, president, Hitwise. “Because the Hitwise technology is based on ISP traffic and is not cookie dependent, we can bring an unprecedented clarity on customer acquisition through this data that is beneficial to anyone investing in search marketing and advertising campaigns.”

The New and Returning Visitor data is updated daily, weekly and monthly and available on the top 10,000 websites visited by Internet users from the U.S. sample of 10 million users.

Some examples of the data include:

• Among Social Networking websites: 6.23 percent of traffic to Facebook.com consisted of new visitors for the week ending Oct. 20, 2007.
• Among Online movie rental websites: Of the traffic going to Netflix.com from Google, 24 percent was from new visitors for the week ending Oct. 20, 2007. Of the traffic going to Netflix.com from Yahoo! Search, 34 percent was from new visitors.
• Among Political candidate websites: Traffic to Ronpaul2008.com consisted of 52 percent returning visitors for the week ending Oct. 20, 2007. Traffic to HillaryClinton.com consisted of 28 percent returning visitors.

The New and Returning Visitors data is calculated by Hitwise’s proprietary data collection software that determines whether an anonymous user has visited a website in the previous 30 days. A New Visitor is classified as a user who has not accessed the website in the previous 30 days. New and Returning data is also available in the UK and Australia markets.

To learn more about Hitwise New and Returning Visitors reports, visit: http://www.hitwise.com/other/new-and-returning-visitors.php

About Hitwise

Hitwise is the leading online competitive intelligence service. Only Hitwise provides its 1,400 clients around the world with daily insights on how their customers interact with a broad range of competitive Web sites, and how their competitors use different tactics to attract online customers.

Since 1997, Hitwise has pioneered a unique, network-based approach to Internet measurement. Through relationships with ISP’s around the world, Hitwise’s patented methodology anonymously captures the online usage, search and conversion behavior of 25 million Internet users. This unprecedented volume of Internet usage data is seamlessly integrated into an easy to use, web-based service, designed to help marketers better plan, implement and report on a range of online marketing programs.

Hitwise, a subsidiary of Experian (FTS: EXPN) www.experiangroup.com and operates in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore. More information about Hitwise is available at www.hitwise.com.

For up to date analysis of online trends, please visit the Hitwise Intelligence-Analyst Weblogs at http://weblogs.hitwise.com and the Hitwise Data Center at www.hitwise.com/datacenter.