Search engines have accounted for 25.79 percent of visits going to the Hitwise Shopping and Classifieds category for the week ending December 2.
Direct competitive traffic, from shopping and classifieds Web sites, made up for 25.72 percent of upstream visits.
E-mail services were at 9.6 percent and rewards and directories, including comparison shopping sites, were at 5.63 percent in the same period.
It was no surprise that Google was in the lead as the search engine sending the most visits to shopping and classifieds sites, accounting for 16.04 percent of visits for the week ending December 2, 2006.
Yahoo came in at second with 4.84 percent and MSN Search at 2.22 percent.
The shopping and classifieds sub-categories receiving the largest percentage of traffic from search engines for the week ending December 2, 2006 were intimate apparel and accessories, with 36.02 percent of upstream traffic from search.
Net communities and chat Web sites, which includes social networking Web sites such as MySpace, are playing a much larger role in driving retail traffic than a year ago. They account for 6.16 percent for the week ending December 2, 2006.
MySpace alone accounted for 2.07 percent of visits to shopping and classifieds Web sites for this past week and was the eighth most popular Web site sending visits to the shopping and classifieds category.
–Posted by Giselle Abramovich
