Case Study

Leading retailer defines customer segments

“Hitwise is a crucial tool for profiling our visitors and allowing us to target our advertising and messaging to them, directly.”

Susan Brandt, VP Marketing Communications, Shopzilla

Shopzilla (www.shopzilla.com), a leading comparison shopping website, uses Hitwise to segment its website visitors to learn more about online customers. This information allows Shopzilla to improve the targeting of its online and offline campaigns.

The Challenge

To find out the exact profile of visitors to the Shopzilla website, including their demographics, behavioral characteristics, attitudes, beliefs, media consumption and shopping preferences.

The Solution

Growing a consumer-facing business requires an intimate understanding of your consumers. Shopzilla uses Hitwise Lifestyle data to improve its understanding of its visitors and applies that insight to its advertising and media plans.

“We relied on both internal and external tools to gain an understanding of our customer base (visits per month, percentage of repeat visits, brand awareness studies and site surveys), but we had no actual profiles of our audience” says Susan Brandt. We know our customers skewed female, are aged 25-54 years with a household income of more than $60K – but we had no behavioral or attitudinal data on our users.”

Using Hitwise Lifestyle, the Shopzilla marketing team identified the profile segments that represented their website visitors. “These Lifestyle segments allowed us to create four distinct personas, which, as a group, we labeled as “comfort-seeking.” These four distinct personas best captured the profiles of our audience including their demographics, family life, attitudes and behaviors.”

For example, one key persona they called the ‘acquirer’ can be described as a family or couple, aged 35-64 years, wealthy or upscale, living in small-towns. They are early adopters and taste-makers who live in comfort. The other 3 personas identified by Shopzilla were ‘traditionalist’, ‘excursionist’ and ‘apprentice.’

“Once we identified our audience, we knew exactly what they looked like which deepened our understanding of their needs and wants and how they use our website,” said Susan Brandt. Having this information allowed us to re-design our site and target our media and messaging to be more relevant and compelling to them.”

The Benefits

Since using Hitwise, Shopzilla has educated its internal staff on the characteristics of its audience in order to be more “focused on our customers, improve our site and enhance our loyalty and repeat usage metrics,” proclaims Brandt.