• by January 24, 2006

Want to know why a rival is racking up more traffic and hits than you are? Who doesn't? Hitwise, the provider of online competitive intelligence, recently upgraded its keyword research tool to enable marketers and their agency partners to get more valuable real-time intelligence. Dubbed Search Intelligence Version 3.0, the tool was upgraded to help marketers immediately identify new search terms that have proven successful in attracting customers to competitors' Web sites.

The enhanced tool enables online marketers to more easily upload their portfolio of search terms while at the same time running gap analysis reports between their current portfolio of terms and those of their competitors. The Gap Analysis report instantly displays the keywords that are missing from a campaign. Once displayed, those keywords can be easily exported to a bid-management tool for execution.

Among the Search Intelligence tool's capabilities: It lets marketers know the search terms they don't have, shows all the terms that drove traffic to a particular site, charts search terms to determine when they spiked, and maps searches to specific retailers' sites.

"We now have provided a means by which our clients can build a custom category and to show which search terms are driving traffic to competitors," says Bill Tancer, Hitwise's general manager of global research, referring to the enhanced tool. "We also have the ability to do time series data on specific search terms. You can narrow it down to visits to a specific industry or searches on a specific word that resulted to searches to a specific site."

Take the Xbox 360, for example. The tool's new functionality enables marketers to analyze what traffic to the multiplayer game was driven by consumer electronics hardware sites. "You can start to understand the intent of the searcher," Tancer says, adding, "The data existed before but there was no way to get at it. Now it's more granular. In the past, the tool would look for every incidence of a search term. Now you can narrow it down by category, by segment, by retailer, by industry."

Apart from clickstream data, the tool can now unearth data on specific search terms.