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.
Google+ growth since launch
On Tuesday, June 28th, Google launched their latest foray in the social networking arena with Google+. In the days following the launch, as invites became more readily available, visits to Google+ steadily increased, particularly between July 5th and July 12th. To date, Tuesday, July 12th and Thursday, July 14th were the peak days for total [...]
Post IPO progress for Pandora
Following the much anticipated IPO of Pandora last week, of course the continued success of the business now comes under additional scrutiny. Among the top metrics to monitor for ongoing growth is the number of registered users and potential advertising revenues. So far for 2011, the number of total visits to Pandora.com increased 35% for [...]
May 21 Judgement Day Interest Grows Online
Predictions about the end of the world tomorrow, May 21, 2011 (not to be confused with the potential end of the world in 2012, predicted by the Mayan calendar) from Harold Camping, the president of the Family Radio, have been received with both skepticism along with believers working toward preparedness. Camping’s followers have been promoting [...]
Presidential Race 2012: Tracking Candidates’ Social Efforts
To date, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich announced their official bids for the White House on Twitter and YouTube. Ron Paul raised over one million dollars in 24 hours online through his political action committee. President Obama hosted an online town hall about the economy on Facebook. Needless to say, the race to the White [...]
Bin Laden News Drives Traffic Peak
While some Americans learned the news Sunday night via Twitter or the announcement from President Obama, curiosity and questions continued well into Monday. The daily visits to News & Media websites reached a three year high for the second time this year on Monday, May 2, 2011 following the announcement of the death of Osama [...]
General Mills Paves the Way for CPG Daily Deals with Groupon
Last Thursday, General Mills became the first large consumer packaged goods company to offer a deal on a daily deals site. The company’s promotion on Groupon gave consumers in Minneapolis and San Francisco the opportunity to receive more than $40 of General Mills products (e.g. Cinnamon Toast Crunch) and a $15 coupon book for the [...]
Royal Wedding Fever? US Interest Falls Below UK, Canada and New Zealand
The Guardian and The Independent are at loggerheads over whether Americans are bored with the Royal Wedding or utterly enthralled. But which newspaper is on the mark? Judging by Experian Hitwise search data, it seems that neither is quite right. It’s no surprise to see that web-users in the UK are performing more than twice [...]
Obama’s Facebook Town Hall Meeting
On April 20th, President Obama visited Facebook headquarters to hold an online “town hall” meeting focused on the economy and The White House’s proposals for deficit reduction. Questions for the President were submitted in advance via The White House’s Facebook page, through The White House’s website, live from a number of social networks and from [...]
British news attracting US Royal Wedding fans
NBC has scaled back its planned coverage of the Royal Wedding in order to avoid potential “viewer fatigue”, an interesting change of strategy given the success & interest of The Today Show’s wedding-focused blog, “The Windsor Knot”. Though the official Royal Wedding site captured the greatest share of relevant search traffic last week, MSN and [...]
Optimizing for The Royal Wedding
Whilst Kate Middleton and Prince William have asked that those wishing to send wedding gifts refer instead to their Charitable Gift Fund, everyone else seems to view the Royal Wedding as a potential cash cow. From Papa John’s “pizza portrait” of the betrothed, to Lifetime network’s made-for-television movie “William & Kate – Let Love Rule”, [...]