Profile: Heather Dougherty is Director, Research at Hitwise. Heather is a leading authority in online commerce and marketing, a result of covering the field extensively since 1997. At Hitwise, Heather will continue her focus on this space, providing insight into online consumer behavior and competitive intelligence to Hitwise clients. Heather's expertise in the online commerce landscape has been quoted extensively in the press, including Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Business Week. Heather has also been a guest on ABC World News Tonight, CNBC, NPR, and CBS Radio. Heather speaks frequently at industry events such as Shop.org, Internet Retailer, Ad:tech and Search Engine Strategies. Prior to joining Hitwise, Heather was with Nielsen/NetRatings as the senior retail analyst, where she provided strategic analysis and designed custom research projects. Before her time at Nielsen, she spent four years with Jupiter Research covering the online retail and commerce space, including marketing and promotions, merchandising, and personalization. Heather earned a B.S. in Business Administration and Marketing at The Ohio State University.
Hispanic Home Buyers Turning to Search
A recent article called “Hispanic Home Buyers Becoming a Force in Real Estate”, highlighted an increase in Hispanic/Latino first time home buyers, which made up 11 percent of all first-time home buyers in 2010, an increase of 38% percent over the previous year (Source: National Association of Realtors’ “Profile of Buyers and Sellers”). Curious as [...]
Facebook acquires photo-sharing network Instagram
Yesterday, Facebook announced the acquisition of Instagram, a popular photo sharing network with over 30 million users, for $1 billion. Visits to the Instagram website have steadily increased over the past 24 weeks and reached 3.8 million last week, up from 68,800 visits for the week ending October 22, 2012. While the majority of activity [...]
Romney leading in Florida per online visits
As we head into the Florida primary on January 31st, we analyzed a category of the four remaining Republican presidential candidates to see who was receiving the most visits from the state of Florida. Experian Hitwise data shows that the Mitt Romney site received the majority of visits from Florida for the four weeks ending [...]
Mitt Romney Winning the Facebook Race
Despite the results of the Iowa caucus and South Carolina primary, if you look at Facebook, Mitt Romney is ahead by a huge margin. Total visits to the Facebook pages of the presidential candidates highlights the growth to Mitt Romney’s Facebook page over the past few weeks, visits have jumped 248% last week as compared [...]
Post Holiday Traffic Boom
After a strong start over the Thanksgiving weekend, the traffic to the top 500 retail websites continue to increase every week throughout the 2011 holiday season as compared to last year. The highest increases year-over-year for daily traffic took place on the day after Christmas where traffic was up 31% over last year and Cyber [...]
Luxury Brand Report Studies New Online Trends
Every day, Experian Hitwise clients discover new trends and opportunities from our timely, insightful online consumer behavior database. We are happy to share these insights by having clients post their findings on this blog and today present analysis on the luxury retail market from PM Digital Research. Despite ongoing volatility in the stock market and [...]
Black Friday Anticipation Builds
Black Friday is almost upon us and the outlook is looking good for a positive start to the holiday season. The NRF predicts that 152 million people will shop over Black Friday weekend, up 10% from last year – a conservative estimate based upon the actual 212 million shoppers that actually appeared in retail stores. [...]
Affluent shoppers boost online retail traffic
Holiday retail sales for 2011 are expected to increase 2.8% to $465.6 billion, according to the National Retail Federation, lower growth than the 5.2% increase in sales from the 2010 holiday season. Last year, the increase in visits to online retailers was higher than the overall lift in sales as consumers researched products and store [...]
Huge Growth Continues for Flash Sales
The popularity of flash sale websites with limited time & inventory offerings have grown exponentially over the two years. Online shoppers’ love for the thrill of snagging designer clothing, home décor, travel and even wine have caused visits to the category to increase 368% in July 2011 as compared to the same month two years [...]
Searches reflecting concerns over debt ceiling
Ongoing debates in Washington DC regarding the debt ceiling have captured the interest of Americans as many struggle to understand the overall impact. Search activity has been building over the past 5 weeks and variations of ‘debt ceiling’ jumped 232% for the week ending July 16, 2011 as compared to the prior week. Last week, [...]