Canadian internet visits to House and Garden websites were up 16% year over year last week (week to 1st May 2010). House and Garden is one of the largest retail categories based on share of internet visits in Canada, ranking as the 5th largest category last week (behind Classifieds, Rewards and Directories, Auctions and Department [...]

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Insurance rates for most Canadians saw a major increase at the start of the year. Insurance was again in the news over the weekend, when Jim Flaherty, Canada’s Finance Minister, indicated that Ottawa will be cracking down on banks’ efforts to sell insurance products on their websites. Banks have long been restricted from promoting insurance [...]

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Students across Canada recently enjoyed a week off for March Break and Hitwise data indicates many left plans to the last minute. Last week, searches that included the words “march break” increased 4 fold compared with four weeks ago. While the exact week off varies by province, last week, Ontario students enjoyed their break, and [...]

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A few weeks ago when I posted my blog entry about Facebook being the largest news reader I received a few comments and emails noting that visitors aren’t as valuable if they don’t come back. Advertisers and retailers need some assurance that visitors will return again and again. Hitwise data indicate that visitors from Facebook.com [...]

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A couple of weeks ago, I did a follow up post on my blog entry, “Facebook Largest News Reader?”. The entry illustrated that Facebook users prefer Broadcast Media while Google News readers prefer Print Media. Several readers requested that I add Twitter to the mix. Twitter.com accounted for 0.14% of upstream visits to News and [...]

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A couple of weeks ago, I posted an entry about Facebook becoming the largest news reader. Facebook does send more traffic to News and Media sites than Google News but looking more closely at the data, I noticed that the two sites send traffic to a very different list of News and Media websites. The [...]

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Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read Write Web had an interesting piece suggesting that Facebook could become the world’s leading news reader. A recent Facebook company blog entry encouraged members to set up a news feed on Facebook. Kirkpatrick contends that with a few tweeks, Facebook could become a major distribution force for news content. The last [...]

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Google’s Nexus One phone is a direct competitor to Apple’s iPhone and the battle lines are being drawn. As illustrated below, the launch of the Nexus One attracted a great deal of excitement online, with searches for “nexus one” accounting for 1 in every 14,000 US Internet searches the week to January 9, 2010. As [...]

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With no end in sight to winter and the charm of the ever-mounting snow banks wearing off, Canadians are turning to the web to book winter escapes. Visits to Travel websites have seen a sharp increase over the past two weeks. Canadian Internet visits were up 34% to Travel websites in the two weeks to [...]

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Canadians may celebrate Thanksgiving in October but similar seasonal trends are apparent in online holiday shopping. Canadian Internet visits to Shopping and Classifieds websites peaked two weeks ago, in the week ending November 27, 2009 – the same week as in the US. While Canadian Internet visits to retail websites reached a peak of 5.46% [...]

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