November 22, 2006

Google Checkout Visits up 30%, Buying Traffic with $10 Off Offer

Google Checkout has been quietly building traffic by adding merchants and offering new customers $10 off a purchase of $30 or more. Its market share of visits was up 30% in the past four weeks (week ending 11/18/06 vs. week ending 10/21/06), and soon it should rank in the top 20 Google properties (See Bill's post from yesterday). Paypal could be considered the nearest competitor to Google Checkout, but Paypal is still dependent on eBay for the majority of its traffic: for the week ending 11/18/06, 70% of Paypal's upstream traffic came directly from eBay. Google Checkout is partnering with a wide variety of merchants, as you can see below in its list of upstream websites from the Shopping & Classifieds category for last week.

Hitwise clickstream data can offer competitive insights into how companies are using Google Checkout. Downstream traffic from a site to Google Checkout could be considered a loose proxy for conversion. The chart below shows the trend in visits leaving merchant sites to Google Checkout. Both Buy.com and Jockey sent 16% and 7% of their respective traffic to Google Checkout last week, which seems like a very high conversion rate. Both sites are promoting the $10 off Google Checkout offer on their home pages, which indicates that the offer could be increasing conversion rates. The other sites on the chart are only showing the offer on the checkout page itself.

Google, with its deep pockets, is effectively buying traffic for its Checkout service, and smart retailers are using the offer to increase their conversion rates, but it could be a long time before it reaches Paypal's traffic levels - the market share of visits to Paypal was 96 times greater than for Google Checkout last week (week ending 11/18/06). Possibly Google's promotional efforts that will launch on Monday 11/27/06 will help.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 05:18 PM
Posted to Shopping and Classifieds

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Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Google Checkout Visits up 30%, Buying Traffic with $10 Off Offer:

» Google checkout visits up 30% says Hitwise from CenterNetworks
Hitwise releases some data on Google Checkout - visits up 30% and more. [Read More]

Tracked on November 22, 2006 05:58 PM

» Google Checkout Visits up 30%, Buying Traffic with $10 Off Offer from AuctionWire
Google Checkout has been quietly building traffic by adding merchants and offering new customers $10 off a purchase of $30 or more. Its market share of visits was up 30% in the past four weeks (week ending 11/18/06 vs. week ending 10/21/06), and soon it s [Read More]

Tracked on November 27, 2006 11:01 PM

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