Internet Research – Secondary Data

Page : 1 2ALL

The Internet is not only a tool for promoting and doing business. It is a tool for researching and gathering data on the external environment, competitors and customers. Many traditional resources such as newspapers and magazines are readily available on the Internet such as TheTimes Online (http://www.timesonline.co.uk) and The Radio Times (http://www.radiotimes.com/). More recently, increases in the availability of broadband and faster Internet connections have allowed the ‘streaming’ of television programmes such as ‘Click’ from the BBC[1]. Companies that specialise in research and marketing information are also providing electronic content either via subscription or the pricing of individual reports. A trip to Mintel (http://www.mintel.co.uk) can provide hundreds of industry specific reports ranging from ‘Activity Holidays – UK’ to ‘Yogurt – US’, whilst the CIA World Fact Book (http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/) provides a wealth of data on countries around the world that can assist with a PESTEL analysis.

According to Nielsen Ratings[2], the average Internet user in the UK (January 2006) visited 74 different domains and spent over 27 hours online. Marketing Managers can summarise the actions of visitors to their own websites by looking at and analysing their web server logs using either online services or application software such as WebTrends (http://www.webtrends.com). When it comes to seeing how competitors are performing or what / who your customers are looking at when they are not on your site, services such as Alexa (http://www.alexa.com) and Netcraft (http://www.netcraft.co.uk) can assist. Between them, Alexa and Netcraft provide an enormous amount of information surrounding the visitors to different websites. Rather like the facility provided by Amazon (http://www.amazon.co.uk) as a potential sales tool which suggests different product linkages based on other customer purchasing patterns, Alexa displays key performance information about numerous sites on the internet such as page loading times, ‘visitors that look at this site also visit these others’, page rankings based on the Google Search Engine (http://www.google.co.uk), changes in performance over time and the top 500 sites across various industry sectors. Netcraft displays similar types of information and in addition displays the type of server used to present the web pages and details of the ‘netblock’ owner or provider of web services for that company of site.

Page : 1 2ALL