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Vouchers, price comparison and cash-back
August 13, 2008
Last month we highlighted how the economic downturn has led to a growth in UK Internet traffic to websites in our Shopping and Classifieds - Rewards and Directories category. Historically this category has been dominated by price comparison sites such as Shopping.com, Ciao and PriceRunner, but over the last year voucher and cash-back sites have been increasing their market share too. In order to understand how much these new entrants have gained on the established players we created 3 custom categories consisting of the top 10 price comparison, voucher and cashback / rewards sites.
As you can see from the chart above, price comparison sites remain the larges sub-category of Rewards and directories, and have increased their market share of UK internet visits over the last 12 months following a gradual decline over the two previous years. The second largest sub category is Voucher sites, which has doubled in size over the last 12 months. The category receives twice as much traffic as Cachback / rewards websites, but less than a third of the amount that goes to Price comparison sites.
For retailers the important question is: which types of sites deliver the most traffic? In the chart above I’ve illustrate the amount of upstream traffic that retailers receive from each of the three sub-categories, and you can see that it follows a very similar pattern to their market shares overall. However, looking at the downstream traffic from each sub-category it becomes clear that different types of reward sites are suited to different types of retailers. For example, price comparison sites deliver the most traffic to gadgets and white goods retailers, while voucher sites are better for entertainment and fashion.
We’ll be looking into these trends in more depth during our retail webinar, Can You Have a Happy Christmas During an Economic Downturn?, next Tuesday (August 19th). This will start at 12:00 UK time and will cover a number of topics, including a summary of what happened last Christmas, a comparison between online and offline retailers, the impact of the economic downturn, as well as some predictions for this Christmas. There will also be a contribution from Experian Footfall. You can register for this free online seminar here.
Keep up to date with the latest Internet usage data, follow Hitwise UK on Twitter.
Posted by Robin Goad at 03:00 PM
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In Categories Christmas | Economy | Retail | Shopping and Classifieds
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Comments
Thanks very much for alerting us to that, Eamon!
Here's a link to the full list - scroll down and Hitwise is included in the online marketing category towards the end:
http://www.spotlightideas.co.uk/?p=302
Robin
Posted by Robin Goad | August 13, 2008 03:22 PM
Hello. Just to let you know that HitWise has been included in Spotlight Ideas Top 100 Advertising, Marketing, Media & PR Blog list (with different genres within the list).
Posted by Eamon | August 13, 2008 03:05 PM