About Click
Do we really understand ourselves? We are fascinated by polls and survey data about our responses to stimuli from the outside world, data can provide interesting insight into what compels or repels us. As the Internet becomes more ingrained in our lives, from reading the news, to communicating through email and social networks, to transacting online, the byproduct of our aggregate movements provides an even deeper insight into who we are.
Click, provides a behind the scenes view into the daily analysis we conduct on the Hitwise research team. With a sample of over ten million Internet users U.S. and twenty-five million worldwide, insights can be gleaned on the sites we collectively visit, what we search for and what that tells us about ourselves. Some samples of interesting facts from Hitwise data:
- The busiest day of the week for visits to adult websites is Friday, the least busiest is on Sunday.
- Searches for “prom dresses” reaches its yearly peak the first week of January every year, well ahead of retailer’s preconceived notions of prom season, one example of the striking difference between when we think consumers search for something and when they actually do.
- The combination of charting search and social network traffic to music artists’ sites provides a visual depiction of Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point.
- Search term data can be used to predict reality television show results, leading financial indicators, even shed light on political campaigns.
There’s a whole new world of insights available and waiting to be tapped in our aggregate Internet behavior, some of our learnings from this data confirm things that we’ve always believed to be true, some that we’d never suspect.