Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Dougherty - North America
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Online shopping traffic remains strong
August 18, 2008
One sector that we continually monitor here at Hitwise for insight into consumer behavior is traffic to the Shopping & Classifieds category. Given the current economic climate, price sensitivity is driving more visits to the websites of online retailers, coupons, and comparison shopping tools as shoppers increasingly research potential purchases online. Overall, the market share of visits increased 19% in July 2008 as compared to the previous year.
Consumers are turning to websites like Craigslist to sell items to augment their income and also seek save money by purchasing used goods, driving significant growth in the Classifieds category. The category of Classifieds websites experienced the highest traffic growth in July 2008, increasing 88% over the previous year. Grocery websites ranked 2nd in terms of year over year growth with a 40% increase, with much of the growth in this category can be attributed to shoppers collecting coupons and information on weekly specials. House & Garden followed with 30% growth with home owners avoiding the weakened real estate market and opting to turn to retailers like The Home Depot and Lowe's for DIY home improvement options instead of moving. The Rewards & Directories category, which includes comparison shopping tools (e.g. Shopping.com, Shopzilla, and PriceGrabber.com) also received higher traffic in July as compared to the previous year.
Overall, the Shopping & Classifieds category received 25% of traffic referred from search. While the number may seem low, keep in mind that many of the product categories received a higher share of traffic from search while the Auctions & Classifieds are less reliant upon search (15% and 14%) but represent nearly 35% of the visits within the Shopping & Classifieds category.
Our current Search Intelligence offerings at Hitwise offer insights into the share of Paid & Organic search traffic for individual websites and in the coming weeks, we’ll be upgrading the tools to include even more detail into the search landscape. One new feature will be the ratio of Paid & Organic search traffic by industry. As an example, below is a paid search quadrant with the majority of the product categories tracked in the Shopping & Classifieds. Along the x-axis is the share of upstream traffic to the product category from search, the product categories that are on the right side of quadrant received the highest share of search referrals (both paid & organic combined). Among the product categories, House & Garden and Sport & Fitness received the most traffic from search, 38% and 35%, respectively. Along the y-axis is the share of paid search traffic, so the product categories in the top right corner are buying the highest share of search traffic. As an example, 40% of the search traffic to the Office Supplies was from paid search.
In addition to offering benchmarking data, these varying ratios can point to the reliance of a product category or industry in driving traffic through organic search results, highlighting the imperative for optimizing a web site vs. the faster testing grounds of paid search copy.
Posted by Heather Dougherty at 09:28 AM
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In Categories Search Engines | Shopping and Classifieds
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