Hitwise Demonstration

Unbeknown to me, our company was recently contacted by Hitwise. They arranged with one of our division managers to do a presentation. I got invited as an afterthought, but it gave me opportunity to sit though a one of their presentations. I guess it’s always good to bring “the guy who works on the website” and who “does that optimization thing” to something internet related.

If you don’t know, Hitwise is a “online competitive intelligence service”. Which when translated into English means, they know a lot about who is visiting what on the internet. This gives them the ability to profile market sectors, consumer behavior and demographics. From a corporate point of view it lets you get a look at what your competitors are doing, how you match up and what you are missing.

The entire presentation is tailored to your company and as you go along they show you live market data. Looking at it from a sales point of view, our presenter, Eric, adapted the presentation very well to what we were interested in. Our company doesn’t describe itself very well, so he wasn’t completely sure what we did at the beginning.

It was interesting to see where our company “ranked” in our sector. I think it was somewhat of a wake up call to the managers. I was surprised to see how much Hitwise knew about our consumers and competitors. If there was “big brother” on the internet, it would be Hitwise, they know way too much.

Included with their information, they had a lot of SEO related data. They had relevant keyword data for our sector, they knew which keywords our competitors were using, and which ones were driving traffic to them. In addition they have the ability to show you which keywords you are targeting well, which ones you are weak on (IE: do more SEO work with these) and which ones we were missing (long tail data).

All in all, they have an amazing amount of useful information. But it also comes with a corporate price tag that most people consider a yearly salary.