Yigber’s Online Adventures

Hitwise has a blog where they reveal search analytics as is acquired by their probes sitting in US ISPs.

For a long time now they claim that “myspace” is the number one general (”All Category”?) search term, by far. Infact Hitwise claim that myspace related searches take over 1.5% of all the searches in the US !!!

The prefix reads:

“The terms listed below are ranked by volume of searches that successfully drove traffic to websites in the Hitwise All Categories category for the 4 weeks ending September 29, 2007, based on US Internet usage.”

“terms that have successfully drove traffic to websites…” - does this imply that Hitwise counts the volume of HTTP GETs with the ?q= pattern in the Referrer field ? It has to be so. What might be even more interesting to Internet marketers is how many high-volume search terms were unsuccessful in driving traffic which means there’s room for marketers to work…

Note that Google’s Keyword Tool gives different volumes, but their stats include the whole world not just US users (right?).

Myspace is relatively low (makes no sense), youtube is relatively low, craigslist and ebay seem to be in the right spot (Adding the other 2 “big” engines still won’t give the volumes that Hitwise estimates for those terms.)

Analytics can be very tricky !