About Hitwise

Hitwise is the leader in online competitive intelligence. Contact Hitwise to maximize your online marketing programs.
Subscribe to RSS Feed via Feedburner Subscribe to Email Feed Subscribe to Twitter Feed

Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Dougherty - North America

Analyst Weblog

« Online news aggregators – friend or foe? | Google Maps Surpasses Mapquest in Visits »

Who Benefits from Circuit City Closure Online

April 09, 2009

Back in January, Circuit City announced ceasing all operations, so we thought it would be interesting to analyze which retailers have benefited from their exit in the market. The brand Circuit City is very well known and drove a significant share of searches from consumers using the name to navigate. As a result of the website and store closings, the share of visits that are going to the Circuit City website that included a search term from a portfolio of Circuit City’s branded terms have declined from 87% during the week of Christmas to 68% for the week ending April 4, 2009. Among Circuit City’s former competitors in the electronics arena, the main beneficiaries of the Circuit City searches are Radioshack.com and Bestbuy.com.

CircuitCity Portfolio Chart.png

Both of the retailers are receiving the search traffic from the portfolio of branded terms in opposite ways. For Radioshack.com, 100% of the traffic from the Circuit City Terms was from paid search over the 4 weeks ending April 4, 2009. With Bestbuy.com, all of the search traffic was driven by organic search results during the same timeframe.

port list sm.png

While Circuitcity.com continues to receive visits as the results of searches and other sources, the only content on the website is the message about the store closings. Once they reach that message, visitors often move on to other retailers to look for products. Here there are also two retailers who are the main beneficiaries of the traffic from Circuitcity.com, Bestbuy.com and Walmart.com. During the week of April 4, 2009, Bestbuy.com captured 20% of the downstream traffic from CircuitCity.com and Walmart.com followed with close to 10%. Kmart.com and Sears.com each captured 4% and 2%, respectively.

CircuitCity Downstream.png

Posted by Heather Dougherty at 05:40 PM | (2) | (1)
In Categories Retail | Search Strategies | Shopping and Classifieds

TrackBack

TrackBack URL:
http://weblogs.hitwise.com/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/1171.

Links to weblogs that reference this entry:

Comments

Seems only natural BestBuy benefits the most with Circuit City closings as it is like a brother. It just shocking to see this giant shut down and only shows how a down economy doesnt help

Posted by JustinSMV | April 12, 2009 10:02 PM

It is interesting that people choose to visit the Walmart.com website after circuit city.

It would be very interesting to see the trend for Walmart.com year over year. I suspect it is significantly higher.

Posted by Ray Kanani | April 13, 2009 05:04 PM

Post a comment

If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry.

 
Image of Heather Dougherty

Heather Dougherty

Director, Research at Hitwise.

Archives (view all posts)

Categories