Hitwise and NFO Form Alliance

Hitwise and NFO Form Alliance

To provide marketers with comprehensive demographic, purchase and product usage data on New Zealand Internet Users

1 October 2002, AUCKLAND – Hitwise, the leading online competitive intelligence service and NFO New Zealand, New Zealand’s leading consultative market research company, today announced an alliance to provide far deeper and more comprehensive insights into the purchase behaviour, product use, and media consumption of New Zealanders.

From next week, marketing strategists will be able to profile both “offline” and “online” activity of New Zealand Internet users through a single user interface.

According to Paul Hashfield, Manager of Hitwise New Zealand, “Today’s marketers don’t care about online, offline or any other line for that matter. They want to know what their prospective customers are actually doing and buying and want to know how to reach them most effectively. Because this single source data shows both offline and online behaviour of online customers or prospective customers, it will give marketers unprecedented insights into attitudinal and purchase activity.”

NFO New Zealand, through its 10,000 annual sample CONTEXT® survey, is asking a range of questions about Internet users’ online and offline purchase of goods and services within a wide range of vertical industries such as grocery shopping, convenience shopping, travel, entertainment, employment, health, financial services, home improvement and utilities. In addition to this data, clients will be able to add their own questions to the survey to provide greater depth and understanding on how users are interacting online with their specific brand or media properties.

The data will be integrated into the Hitwise interface, which already monitors over 150,000 websites as visited by more than 370,000 New Zealand Internet users.

This combination will provide marketers with the most comprehensive and seamless picture of the online and offline competitive environment yet seen. It is a large enough sample to allow full interrogation of the database to give robust demographic profiles of New Zealand Internet users, but also to drill down to very specific purchase and product usage detail. This includes the ability to monitor over 14,000 New Zealand online properties and over 100 traditional media properties.

The first stage of the integration of NFO New Zealand’s demographic and purchase data into the Hitwise competitive intelligence service will be available from 7 October 2002. All existing Hitwise clients will have free trial access to the Internet Usage data. Specific Brand usage data on over 600 New Zealand products and services will be available from 1 November 2002.

For further background information and data contact:

Paul Hashfield
paul.hashfield@hitwise.com

Selected Insights From The Demographic and Internet Usage Analysis now Available Through Hitwise:

 74% of the New Zealand population over the age of 13 now has access to the internet.

 Email continues to dominate as the most popular online activity, with over 93% of all New Zealand Internet users using it.

 When it comes to who claims to be “very comfortable” with the Internet, the figure for Males is twice that of Females.

 People most likely to listen to Net Radio are aged 13-17, with the highest incidence of listening coming from Auckland.

 People most likely to Purchase or Order Products Online are 25-49, with the highest purchasing incidence coming from Wellington.

 Internet users searching for Food and Wine Information are most likely to reside either in Auckland, or in regional South Island.

 When it comes to Researching Healthcare Online 36% of female Internet users are searching for health-related information compared to 27% of male internet users.

 When researching Holiday Information, 61% of Internet users 25-49 are looking online and 28% of all Internet users have actually booked online. Users of travel sites are evenly distributed across Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Regional North Island and Regional South Island.

 When it comes to Advertising on Websites, internet users from Auckland are most likely to click on ads, while throughout New Zealand, the older the respondent the more likely they are to click on ads that are “directly related” to what they are looking for at the time.

Source:NFO Context August 2002: 1,000 respondents representative of the New Zealand population

ABOUT HITWISE

Hitwise is the leading online competitive intelligence service giving strategists, agencies and financial analysts real-time insights on the online competitive environment. Hitwise uses ISP user activity logs, behavioral monitoring networks and proprietary Internet trawling technologies to monitor the surfing habits of local Internet users, covering home, work and educational usage. Monitoring the largest sample of Internet users of its kind in the world, Hitwise provides daily insights all companies need to make timely and effective business decisions.

Hitwise is headquartered in Melbourne, Australia and offers its service in
Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Hong Kong and Singapore.

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