Retail e-commerce sites are the most aggressive in using sponsored search to drive traffic to their online stores, according to a new study from comScore Networks.
E-commerce sites are the most frequent users of search engine marketing, with each of the top ten search engine marketers being either retail or comparison-shopping sites.
The study found that nearly 20 billion sponsored links were served to U.S. Internet users from the top search engines. EBay.com was the top search engine marketer, with 802 million sponsored-link exposures.
The top ten paid search advertisers generated 16 percent of all sponsored links. This number represents retail and comparison-shopping sites.
Smarter.com came in second after eBay with 366 million sponsored-link exposures and Shopping.com came in third with 357 million.
ComScore looked at referral activity by the top search engines in directing click-throughs to retail sites and found that Google Web Search accounted for 57.3 percent of all click-throughs. Google directed 53.8 percent of those click-throughs to retail sites.
Yahoo Web Search directed 27.2 percent of click-throughs to retail sites, followed by MSN Web Search with 10.4 percent.
Here is comScore’s list of top sites generating search engine sponsored-link exposures:
Sponsored Link Share of
Exposures (000) Sponsored Link
Exposures
Total Internet 19,762,951 100%
—————————————————————–
eBay.com 801,744 4.1%
Smarter.com 365,766 1.9%
Shopping.com 357,012 1.8%
Bizrate.com 297,649 1.5%
Amazon.com 284,328 1.4%
Dealtime.com 283,574 1.4%
Shopzilla.com 245,398 1.2%
Target.com 202,482 1.0%
Nextag.com 163,220 0.8%
Shop.com 123,009 0.6%