Hitwise Enhances Lifestyle Reporting Tool

Hitwise is expected today to release the next iteration of its lifestyle reporting tool to its customers. The enhanced offering includes the ability for site owners and media buyers to drill down into demographic and psychographic data on theirs and competitive sites.

The lifestyle data is provided through a partnership with VNU-owned marketing information resources company Claritas. The Claritas PRIZM NE product is based on U.S. Census data and additional qualifiers to provide segmentation for marketers. Sites like USATODAY.com and optimization player Poindexter Systems also use PRIZM data to let advertisers target to specific segments.

“It’s just one of the arrows in the quiver that our clients have to become really competitive and understand not only their own traffic but a competitor’s traffic,” Hitwise GM of Global Research Bill Tancer told ClickZ News.

The lifestyle data exists as a module within the Hitwise Rankings product. Several enhancements to the lifestyle component aid marketers to drill deeper into the search intelligence and clickstream data provided by Hitwise. Marketers now have the ability to get data on groups and segments including geo-distribution, lifestyle and offline media behaviors and 14 demographic and lifestyle categories. Data is uploaded weekly.

Marketers using the Hitwise Rankings product can drill down on their own Web sites or those of competitors to see each demographic and psychographic group the site serves, and how well it matches up with each segment. Each snapshot shows the evolving audience of one or more sites, displaying each segment defined by the U.S. Census from affluent to low income and all points in between. The tool then reports on the urbanicity — meaning whether a visitor lives in an urban area, small city or rural area — and other behavioral data.

“A lot of online marketers may have been conditioned to the fact that demographic and psychographic data are static,” said Tancer. “Demographics and psychographics can change frequently, and our data helps you see what those changes are.”

Tancer said the product offering is unique to Hitwise. “Nothing gives you this type of online segmentation for sites,” he said.

The Hitwise Rankings product includes rankings, search intelligence, clickstream, industry statistics, lifestyle, demographics, charting, alerts and custom reports. The original lifestyle offering became part of the company’s offerings back in Q1 2004.