Travel - Maps Growth As Local Search Heats Up

Visits to the Travel - Maps category by Australian Internet users grew by 43.9% between the week ending April 8, 2006 and the corresponding week last year. The beta launch of ninemsn's MyLocal service, and the expected launch of integrated maps and local search offerings from other major players in Australia signals a highly competitive market ahead.

Whereis.com (whereis.com), owned by Sensis, holds the dominant market share in the Travel - Maps category, with 40.9% of online visits for the week ending April 8, 2006. Much of the recent category growth has been driven by the launch of Google Maps (maps.google.com) and Google Earth (earth.google.com) which ranked 2nd and 4th respectively for the same week.

In the Business and Finance - Business Directories category, Sensis web properties again dominate. WhitePages (www.whitepages.com.au), YellowPages (www.yellowpages.com.au) and Sensis (www.sensis.com.au) were the top three ranking websites, accounting for a combined 73.6% market share for the week ending April 8, 2006. The nearest competitor was a new entrant owned by News Ltd., TrueLocal.com.au, which maintained 3.6% market share.

The applications of mapping technology online have a wide scope, where a number of Google mashups, or websites using the Google API for novel content areas, are popping up. An example includes social networking website, Frappr (www.frappr.com) which allows users to find friends' locations by their post code. Frappr ranked at 7th position in the Travel - Maps category, holding 2.6% market share for the week ending April 8, 2006.

The opportunity exists here to extend net community functionality into business directories to improve the relevancy of the service to consumers. Indeed, the possibilities of combining various content formats appear endless, where there will be more start-ups offering ancillary services to the major players.

Hitwise Search Intelligence data show that there were 249,531 search terms that drove traffic to the Maps and Business Directories categories combined, over a 12 week period ending April 8, 2006. The search term, 'post codes' drove a significant amount of traffic to both categories, with 602 variations on this term. Australia Post received the majority of this traffic (66.8%), where local search providers have the opportunity to improve website visits on these variations.

The following report lists the most popular terms typed into a search engine over the 12 weeks ending 15/04/2006 that resulted in traffic to websites classified by Hitwise within the 'Television' industry. For example, the most popular search term was 'ninemsn' representing 1.19% of all search terms that delivered users to websites classified by Hitwise in the 'Television' industry.

Fast Mover - Kellogg's Nutri-Grain Dream Team

afl.virtualsports.com.au

Position 11 March: 426
Position 8 April: 59
Positions jumped: 367

Kellogg's Nutri-Grain Dream Team (afl.virtualsports.com.au) is a fantasy Australian Rules Football game available through the official website of the Australian Football League (www.afl.com.au) and powered by virtualSPORTS.com.au (www.virtualsports.com.au). Users, once registered, become the selector and coach of their own team of AFL players and have the chance to win weekly cash and prizes.

The website ranked 426 among all websites visited by Australians on 11 March 2006 and jumped to 59 on 8 April 2006. In recent weeks the site has peaked on 30 March, coinciding with the first match of the 2006 AFL season; April 4, the day after Round 1 matches were completed; as well as April 10, the day after Round 2 matches were completed.

The top websites that were visited before the Kellogg's Nutri-Grain Dream Team site for March were Australian Football League (46.4%); Google Australia (4.7%); Trading Post AFL Tipping (2.4%), followed by ninemsn (2.1%) and CricInfo (1.1%). Two football sites (BigFooty.com and BomberLand) feature in the top 20.

The five most popular terms typed into a search engine over the 12 weeks ending 8 April 2006 that resulted in traffic to the Kellogg's Nutri-Grain Dream Team website were "afl dream team", "afl", "dream team", "afl dreamteam" and "kellogg's dream team".

Category Spotlight: Lifestyle - House and Garden

The House and Garden category includes all home hardware and handyman websites, plus DIY guides and anything related to gardening, building, renovation or home decorating. The data below is based on All sites » Weekly rankings for the week ending 15/04/2006 » Ranks by 'Visits'.

Top 10 Lifestyle - House and Garden sites for Australian audiences		Local Competitiveness Index
homesite.com.au Ikea Furniture Burke's Backyard Online Bunnings Building Supplies Spotlight Australia Better Homes and Gardens Ikea Australia - West Freedom Furniture Gardening Australia Our House		65.4% of traffic to this category was directed at domestic sites.

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Copyright Hitwise Pty Ltd, April 2006