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Hitwise Intelligence - Bill Tancer - North America

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Tax Season Comes Early Online

January 25, 2006

Continuing with the theme that online activity can reveal some surprising (and not so surprising but still interesting) trends depending on your viewpoint, the chart below is an industry category chart showing the market share of visits to the Business & Finance - Accountancy category, where all tax preparation websites are categorized.

tax season.png

If the last two years are any indication of this year, we expect that over the next two weeks, visits to Accounting websites will peak for the year, overwhelming the peak just prior to tax day, April 15th. Before drawing this chart two years ago I expected to see the second week of April as the predominant spike. After talking to some contacts in the online tax filing business, I was enlightened to the fact that a large portion of online tax filers are expecting returns, and thus complete their filings online as soon as their 1099s and W-2s are in (the last week in January).

Posted by Bill Tancer at 02:36 PM | (0) | (0)