Chitika builds brand through Insights division
Courtesy of Chitika Inc.
A Chitika graph measures adoption of the latest iPhones among users who visited websites within Chitika's advertising network the weekend the smartphones launched.
Though it won’t make its bread and butter delivering statistics on mobile device adoption, Westborough’s Chitika Inc., an Internet advertising company, is hoping to boost brand awareness among consumers through its burgeoning insights division.
Launched in 2010, Chitika Insights is the company’s independent analysis arm. The division initially focused on web search traffic trends, but in 2012, began to migrate to the mobile device sphere, said Andrew Waber, marketing analyst at Chitika.
Chitika doesn’t charge for reports it issues based on these queries, but the years of work the 11-year-old company has put into collecting usage data is beginning to pay dividends. Top news outlets, like the Washington Post, Bloomberg News, and the Wall Street Journal, have cited Chitika’s adoption statistics in recent reports on mobile device adoption, with Apple’s iPhone 6 being the latest example.
A look beyond sales numbers
After querying its ad network across more than 350,000 web sites in the U.S. and Canada, Chitika estimated on Sept. 22 that 1.5 percent of all mobile device traffic in the two countries came from users of the new iPhone, providing insight on how many consumers were actually using the product.
Apple reported a record 10 million units sold the weekend the iPhone 6 launched, but that number doesn’t indicate how many were actually in the hands of customers, as many of those units were sold to retailers; according to Chitika, adoption of the iPhone 6 actually trailed iPhone 5 adoption slightly after the first weekend of sales.
Chitika also made headlines when the Internet retailer Amazon cut the price of its first smartphone, the Amazon Fire Phone, on Sept. 8, in a bid to boost sales. The New York Times cited Chitika data indicating the Fire Phone generated just .02 percent of North American smartphone web traffic in the 20 days following its July launch.
Waber: Variety, history a leg up for Chitika
Waber said Chitika’s insights are unique because its ad network is varied, spanning a host of sites from e-commerce to news. Other mobile advertising companies are beginning to jump into this arena, but Waber said the company has a safe lead on many competitors.
“We’re able to really put a lot of figures in context because we’ve been generating this data for so long,” Waber said.
Research firms like comScore and IDC collect similar data using different methods that measure Internet usage patterns from a panel of users who have agreed to let the firms track their Internet activity, and Waber admitted that method has certain advantageous over Chitika’s process of measuring ad impression within its limited network. But Chitika can turn around results in a day or two, while research firms take longer to compile reports.
Despite new found fame in the world of mobile Internet usage insights, Chitika will continue to offer reports measuring the latest trends at no cost. Waber said the company is hoping to make itself more accessible to consumers and businesses owners, whose eyes might glaze over at the mention of online advertising.
“It’s not the most exciting thing,” Waber said. “But the iPhone 6 — that’s on everybody’s mind.”
WBJ Web Partners
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