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Hitwise Intelligence - Bill Tancer - North America
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Google Finance - After the Redesign
December 15, 2006
I've had several requests to provide some numbers on finance.google.com in light of their redesign this week. Here are some quick daily stats from this week:
On Wednesday 12/13/06, Google Finance ranked 16th in our Business & Finance - Business Information category with .78% market share of visits for the category up from last Wednesday's 22nd position with .68% market share. Still the industry leader, Yahoo! Finance with 37.3% market share for the category, has over 50x the market share of Google Finance.
Here's a daily marketshare of visits chart for Google Finance:
With a clearly compelling set of features and slick design, why is the gap between Google Finance and Yahoo! Finance so large? Aside for brand and switching cost issues, One possible explanation is the differences in distribution channels for the two finance sites. For 12/13/06, Google received 57% of its traffic from the Google homepage (www.google.com) primarily from search on stock ticker symbols. Yahoo! Finance in contrast received only 1.7% of its traffic from search with over 55% of its traffic coming from the Yahoo! front page and My Yahoo! pages.
Posted by Bill Tancer at 06:25 PM
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why is the gap between Google Finance and Yahoo! Finance so large?
In the UK at least, I believe it's at least partly a function of Yahoo! carrying unit trusts and Google not. An average UK private investor (who isn't advised abominably) will start off with a spread of funds before they start dabbling in individual equities; many start off with an ISA, for example, which might mean an investment trust or individual shares but will most commonly involve a unit trust, which Yahoo! will cover but Google not.
Aside for brand and switching cost issues
The switching costs, and therefore Yahoo!'s historical first-mover advantage, are largely obviated by Google's incorporation of a portfolio import feature in the redesign, I think. Brand may still be an issue though - Google is "about" search (see how much trouble they have getting users to adopt their vertical sites rather than going through the main engine) and Yahoo! of course is a portal.
I like your explanation that it's a traffic-sourcing issue though, very compelling.
Posted by Seamus McCauley | December 19, 2006 09:35 AM
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Great post. I believe that is partly due to the reason that Y! finance meets the users needs and hence no reason why they should switch to Google's. And I don't think G is positioned to compete with Yahoo's, but, rather to meet the needs of the Google user's financial info needs. Different positioning and hence different users.
Also, it would be interesting to see how Yahoo! finance gets its traffic from and how much of them are from Google's SERPs.
I am long reader of this excellent blog. And thanks for putting all these excellent info.
Posted by Rama | December 16, 2006 10:24 PM