Hitwise Press Release
Freedom Air online birthday promotion a roaring success
Auckland, 11th November 2003; Hitwise, the worlds leading online competitive intelligence service, reports that budget
airline Freedom Air ( www.freedomair.com) has celebrated its 8th birthday by giving away 5,000 free one-way tickets. The offer began at noon
on Monday, although travellers keen to snap up a bargain reportedly visited the site well before the offer began,
causing the site to become unavailable to many seeking free seats.
Freedom Air has performed consistently over the past 12 months, earning itself places in the Hitwise Top Ten awards for
both the Travel - Transport category and also the Aviation - Commercial Airlines category. Yesterday's birthday
celebration, however, brought about unprecedented growth, with the site climbing to number one in both categories.
If success were to be measured by sheer volume of traffic in one day, Freedom Air's efforts would be nothing short of
phenomenal. The site's market share of the Travel - Transport category increased by a massive 926% to take a total of
77% of all New Zealand traffic to New Zealand websites in that category for Monday the 10/11/03.
Please see below or attachment: Freedom_1.0.jpg
Most of the traffic on the day of the offer came from search engines. Search engine referrals accounting for the top 5
sites visited before www.freedomair.com. The most prominent were Google NZ ( www.google.co.nz) with 15.32% and xtramsn Search (search.xtramsn.co.nz) driving 8% of all traffic to the site.
About Hitwise
Hitwise is the leading provider of online competitive intelligence services to Fortune 1000 corporations, providing
corporate marketers with real-time insights into their online competitive environment. Via a combination of ISP data
partnerships and opt-in mega panels, Hitwise collects anonymous information about the usage habits of more than 25
million Internet users worldwide, covering home, work and educational usage. With a categorized database of over 300,000
of the world's most popularly visited websites, Hitwise is able to offer a daily analysis of over 150 vertical markets
in each country of operation.
Hitwise is a privately held company and is headquartered in Melbourne, Australia and operates in New Zealand, UK, US,
Hong Kong, Australia and Singapore.
ENDS