Unlike Prince, who recently proclaimed the internet as “over“, Harriet Hitwise believes the internet is alive and thriving. Harriet has created a series of successful, yet niche, online content platforms – most recently one that includes a lifestyle blog for young adults in the St. Paul, Minnesota area. In order to understand her particular audience, Harriet’s been leveraging Hitwise’s Demographic Find By tool to locate websites that align with her preferred online audience. Unmatched in its breadth and data depth, Harriet is able to filter a 10+ million online sample based on Age, Gender, State, DMA, Household Income and even MOSAIC Type.
Despite the combination of data depth and demographic information, Harriet was looking for additional methods to understand her target audience. In particular, Harriet needed to grasp the competitive landscape and market share of sites within her selected audience segments (age: 18-24 and DMA: St. Paul). Access to this data would help frame other marketing decisions while benchmarking performance.
Thankfully, Hitwise’s new Rank by Audience product leverages its demographic data and incorporates market share of websites’ into Rankings, so Harriet now knows that of the visitors to the Blogs & Personal Websites Category that are aged 18-24, 3.14% of them visit www.popeater.com, a popular blog within her audience segment. Additional sorting options further allow Harriet to analyze long-tail sites that match her competitive set, allowing her to target sites that have a lower volume of traffic, but higher concentration of her preferred audience segment.
The power of Rank by Audience is its flexibility to apply any type of demographic variable, including New versus Returning visitors, to better understand the market power of websites influencing her core audience. Harriet could even compare these results relative to all visitors to the Category. See our blog post “Targeting College Students for Back to School” for an example that utilizes the compare feature in Rank by Audience.
As expected, Rank by Audience can be found within the Rankings tab and enabled by selecting an Industry and the preferred Segment.

This creates a new “bucket” of users – those from the selected demographic variable that visited the selected Category. Now Harriet can understand the impact of websites given this newly defined market and clearly view how websites perform based on market share of visits:

Beginning today, Rank by Audience and New versus Returning visitor data will be offered as part of our commitment to providing best-in-class online intelligence tools.
Stay tuned to the Insider Blog for upcoming product announcements, including several new initiatives around Search Marketing.