Hitwise: Google Sends 11% of Retail Site Traffic in December
A new holiday 2005 report from the Internet monitoring service Hitwise claims more than one in 10 visitors to leading retail Web sites came through the Google search engine.According to the report, 11.1 percent of all shopping and classifieds site visits in December originated at Google, up 28 percent from the year-ago period. Yahoo Search drove 4.05 percent of the traffic for the period, and MSN Search 0.79 percent.
All told, search engines drove 18.3 percent of all shopping and classifieds site visits in December.
The biggest recipients of Google-originating traffic, in descending order, were eBay, Amazon, Google's Froogle comparison-shopping service and BizRate, a Shopzilla-owned comparison-shopping engine. These four sites combined accounted for 18.1 percent of Google's downstream online retail traffic, Hitwise said.
Meanwhile, the share of searches containing the word "ipod" was up an average of 175 percent in the 2005 holidays versus 2004. Hitwise also said searches containing the terms "mp3 player" increased an average 28 percent in the timeframe.
Mickey Alam Khan covers Internet marketing campaigns and e-commerce, agency news as well as circulation for DM News and DMNews.com. To keep up with the latest developments in these areas, subscribe to our daily and weekly e-mail newsletters by visiting www.dmnews.com/newsletters
