• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 31, 2017

Hitwise, a division of Connexity, will introduce an insight reporting capability Tuesday that gives marketers hourly visibility into online consumer behavior and competitive Web traffic trends.

The News and Media category will be the first to roll out, allowing publishers and editorial teams to track competitors' products and content performance. The feature, Intraday Insights, creates hourly reports that offer near-real time awareness into Web traffic trends, and enables publishers and brands to follow consumer interests.

"Near real time" means providing an hourly perspective of the data every four hours, says Giles Longhurst, SVP and GM for Hitwise Audience Solutions.

Even with a delay of a few hours, publishers can gauge the most popular articles across competing news sites and adjust content creation and promotions. Marketers can react quickly to competitive threats and opportunities to reach consumers.

Along with News and Media, the Retail and the Travel categories make up the first three industry segments, with more to follow.

In the News and Media Category, the data breaks down the share of page views by the hour, showing spikes on publisher sites such as CNN, Fox News, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, and The Washington Post.

CNN, for instance, took 2.1% of the total page views at 11 a.m. and dropped steadily each hour after until 6 p.m., whereas Fox News spiked at 11:30 a.m.  

The reporting also tracks specific articles via URL. When comparing content, the report can show that 17% of the Web traffic across all sites Hitwise tracked during one specific hour went to live CNN coverage of the political inauguration.  

Hitwise reports on behavioral and media consumption patterns from 20 million Web sites and 500 million Web searches. The Intraday Insights model supports historical hourly data reports that will provide tracking of custom data sets from competitive domains, comparing total visits, share of market, upstream traffic sources, and search clicks.

Longhurst says marketers also can use the data to optimize for search queries and improve rankings. By having up-to-the-minute insights on trending topics, he said marketers can ensure that the content on their Web sites is highly relevant to searches that take place on Google, Bing and other search engines.