Singapore Online Industry is getting hotter now, especially Online Marketing.
If you work in Singapore, you can see that not only SMEs but MNCs are increasingly interested in Online Marketing.
I am literally just back from a short trip to Malaysia 2 hours ago so this post will be quite short.
My intention is to give you some analysis based on Hitwise Data (Year to June 28).
One question you may ask is why i always use Hitwise, the fact is there are only two more well known companies who offer competitive Online info: Hitwise and comScore.
Based on their methodologies, i prefer Hitwise over comScore. Personally it’s easier for me to interpret Hitwise data.
Top 20 websites June 2008:
Again, they are ranked in terms of visits, not PageViews (PVs) or unique users etc…
The top 3 are all search engines: Google and Yahoo. However, judging from the fact that Yahoo Search Market Share is falling, which i will mention later, i think people go to Yahoo more for news or finance info rather than a search engine.
Mail.live.com is strong as expected since Live Messenger is still very popular in Singapore. I think it’s because of the habit issue and singaporeans are used to MSN messenger to it’s hard for them to make a switch.
A very amusing name appears on the top 20, which is paypal. To be honest, since this is the report covering all industries, i would expect news site like Channel News Asia or Straight Times or other local entertainment portals to make it to the top 20.
However, the fact that Paypal ranks higher than Hardwarezone, singapore pools and soccernet so us that B2C e commerce(local or international) in Singapore is changing fast. I will take note of this and let you know if anything interesting comes up.
Leading Search Engines:
Simple, Google has 64.57% of the Search market share for the 24 weeks ending June 28, 2008.
Yahoo has 28.09%
About a year ago, Google only had about 60% of the market share, while Yahoo stayed at around 30%. However, 1 year later, Google’s gain 4 points to 64.5% and Yahoo dropped 2 points.
Together Google and Yahoo have gained 2 points over all other search engines like Live, or local Search Engine.
I am not sure the motivation behind RedNano, which is backed up by Government Owned MediaCorp. Personally, I don’t see future for RedNano especially Singapore is not strong in Search Technology. I could be wrong…
Top 10 industry search terms
Well, this is my favorite. I said it before and i will repeat here again: People are Lazy, especially Online Generation. They are so lazy that even site like Youtube, they don’t bother to remember the actual URL (youtube.com) or type them in web browsers. What they do is go to Google (or most of them have tool bars with built-in Search function now) and type in youtube….
So what’s the implication?
With customers are getting more and more lazy and they rely more and more on Search Engines to find what they want, can you afford not to have Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Strategies in place.
SEM is a term for both PPC and SEO. Please don’t refer to SEM as PPC or Pay per Click and SEO is as a separate thing. And when you start your PPC program, please do both Google Adwords and Yahoo Panama.
Industry Statistics
This month, it’s about “Aviation – Commercial Airlines”
There is no surprise that State owned Singapore Airlines and its subsidiaries Tiger Airways (budget carrier) and SilkAir (for exotic destinations) are amongst the top 10 most visited sites in Aviation – Commercial Airlines in Singapore.
With regards to Upstream Search Engine Before visiting sites in this industry, Google (33.51%) drives far more traffic than Yahoo (14.66)
This is understandable since it’s people habit to go to Google to Search for travel related stuff. However, because of that the level of competition amongst PPC advertisers on Google is very fierce.
It’s not easy to run a PPC campaign on Google and derive a good Return on Investment (ROI). So i suggest that you may want to give Yahoo a chance and see how it goes, since you face less competition over there.
I list down the top search terms below just to reemphasize the fact that how lazy people are nowadays.
One last thing is about top upstream industries Before visiting “Aviation – Commercial Airlines” for the month of June 2008
I find it weird is because when you look at how Hitwise categories industry at the end of the report:
Computers and Internet consists of:
- E-Greetings
- Electronics
- Email Services
- Graphics and Clip Art
- Hardware
- Hosting and Domain Registration
- Internet Advertising
- Paid to Surf
- Portal Frontpages
- Search Engines
- Social Networking and Forums
- Software
- Webcams
- Web Development
Because of this, i am not sure how we should interpret the data correctly then. Most probably, you will need to dig further before reaching an immature conclusion.
Oh and if you don’t know what Upstream is. It simply mean “before” or it refers to referring traffic sources/domains/industries etc…
That’s about it for today guys. Feel free to drop any comments as per usual.
Good night,
Chandler