Auckland, September 9 2005

In the lead up to a tight election result in New Zealand, Hitwise, the leading online intelligence service, reports that searches for current PM, Helen Clark are ahead of searches for the leaders of the National and New Zealand First parties. Searches on ‘Helen Clark’ accounted for 60% more than searches on ‘Don Brash’ and 220% more than ‘Winston Peters’, for the week ending September 3, 2005.

Visits to the Lifestyle – Politics category have increased substantially during the election period, rising by 36% between June 4, 2005 and September 3, 2005.

The National and Labour parties appear to be attracting fairly even numbers of website visits. For the week ending September 3, 2005, The National Party of New Zealand (www.national.org.nz) website ranked #2 in Lifestyle – Politics with 7.63% market share, followed by The New Zealand Labour Party (www.labour.org.nz), with 6.03%. The Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand (www.greens.org.nz) was the third most popular party visited online with 5.14% market share.

The Green Party have also adopted a blog (blog.greens.org.nz) to provide election commentary. Users can subscribe to podcasts for interviews of Green MPs on the campaign trail.

The Elections New Zealand website (www.elections.org.nz) which allows Kiwis to enrol for elections was the 5^th most popular website in the Government – National category, for the week ending September 3, 2005. The site also provides New Zealanders living overseas the ability to enrol and download ballot papers which they can then mail or fax in.

Search term variations on ‘tax’ show the impact of the National Party’s tax campaign: ‘national party tax calculator’ and ‘national party tax cuts’ were the 12^th and 17^th most popular variations respectively for the 24 weeks ending September 3, 2005, with 4 references to ‘national’ in the Top 20 terms.

About Hitwise:

Hitwise is the world’s leading online competitive intelligence service. Each day, Hitwise monitors how more than 25 million Internet users interact with over 500,000 websites across 160 industry categories.

By monitoring more people, more websites, more often, Hitwise provides marketers with timely and actionable marketing insights on how their online presence compares to competitive websites.  Companies use this information to maximize the return on their online investment, in efforts such as search marketing, affiliate programs, online advertising, visitor segmentation, content development and lead generation.

Hitwise collects Internet usage information via a combination of ISP data partnerships and opt-in mega panels, and complies with local and international privacy legislation as audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Founded in 1997, Hitwise is a privately held company, headquartered in New York City and operates in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore. 

More information about Hitwise is available at www.hitwise.co.nz

For media enquiries, please contact:

James Borg

0800 HITWISE or james.borg@hitwise.com