Hitwise Australia January Retail Update

Retail sector winners; Apple iTunes grows 15% year-on-year

Melbourne - 11 January 2008 – Hitwise Australia, the leading competitive intelligence service, today reveals the retail sectors that performed strongly online during the 2007 Christmas period. Appliances & Electronics, Books, Music and Video & Games experienced substantial increases upwards of 30% in website traffic in the last quarter of 2007. Visits to the Department Stores online industry were also solid, increasing in category share by 42% between weeks ending 6 October 2007 and 15 December 2007.

Visits to Shopping & Classifieds websites peaked during the holiday shopping period in 2007 during the week ending 1 December 2007. This compared to the week ending 25 November 2006 the prior year, confirming that the optimum time for reaching consumers during the holiday shopping period remains between late November and early December. Searches for ‘boxing day sales’ spiked dramatically during the week ending 29 December 2007, with the News & Media industry capturing 19.6% of related search traffic, compared to 8.03% for Shopping & Classifieds websites.

In the Appliances & Electronics industry, consumer searches were dominated by bricks & mortar brands, including ‘harvey norman’, which accounted for 5.36% of search volume, ‘good guys’ (1.62%), ‘jb hifi’ (1.55%) and ‘retravision’ (1.45%) for the 4 weeks ending 29 December 2007. ‘Mobile phones’ and ‘digital cameras’ remained top product terms to the industry, while ‘digital photo frames’ spiked during the week ending 15 December 2007; almost triple the volume of searches compared to the same time last year.

The strong growth in visits to the Music retail industry was due to the growth of Apple iTunes, which experienced a year-on-year increase of 15%, comparing weeks ending 30 December 2006 and 29 December 2007. New users comprised 72% of visits to the Apple iTunes website for the week ending 29 December 2007, suggesting that recipients of iPods on Christmas day were eager to log on and download media for their new gifts.

Pure-play retail websites, DealsDirect.com.au, oo.com.au and Lasoo.com.au had a strong impact on driving growth to the online Department Stores industry during early to mid-December, as consumers made allowances for shipping times; while Kmart, Big W and Myer enjoyed significant gains peaking week ending 29 December 2007, enjoying last minute and post-Christmas sales visits.

Visitors to the Shopping & Classifieds industry were highly represented by users in the 25 – 44 age bracket, who were likely to visit retail websites for toys. There was a year-on-year increase in visits by female Internet users to the Shopping & Classifieds industry, who comprised 55.64% of visits the week ending 29 December 2007, compared to 47.47% week ending 30 December 2006. This was a reflection of increasing visits to Health & Beauty shopping websites.

For media queries contact Rheika Tompkins on +61 3 8530 2420 or email press.au@hitwise.com

About Hitwise

Hitwise is the leading online competitive intelligence service. Only Hitwise provides its 1,400 clients around the world with daily insights on how their customers interact with a broad range of competitive websites, and how their competitors use different tactics to attract online customers.

Since 1997, Hitwise has pioneered a unique, network-based approach to Internet measurement. Through relationships with ISPs around the world, Hitwise’s patented methodology anonymously captures the online usage, search and conversion behavior of 25 million Internet users. This unprecedented volume of Internet usage data is seamlessly integrated into an easy to use, web-based service, designed to help marketers better plan, implement and report on a range of online marketing programs.

Hitwise, a subsidiary of Experian (FTS: EXPN) www.experiangroup.com operates in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore. More information about Hitwise is available at www.hitwise.com.

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