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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

Analyst Weblog

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Voucher sites overtake Price Comparisons sites online

February 15, 2012

Last year I wrote two blogs on the rise of social shopping and the changing facets of rewards websites like voucher and cashback sites. These proved very popular so I thought I would follow these up with a look at how these websites performed over Christmas.

The Experian Hitwise Rewards and Directories category was one of the fastest growing industries online in 2011. We split this parent category into four key sub-categories: cashback sites like Quidco; shopping price comparison sites like Shopzilla; social shopping sites like Groupon; and voucher sites like HotUKDeals.

Comparing total visits to each of the sub-categories in December 2010 and December 2011 you can see there has been a solid year-on-year increase for cashback, social shopping and voucher sites, but a huge drop in visits for price comparison sites.

Visits to price comparison sites have halved year-on-year, and now voucher websites are the dominant rewards category with 37.4 million UK Internet visits in December 2011, up 28% from last December. Social shopping sites like Groupon and Living Social have also overtaken cashback sites in terms of total visits, after witnessing a 58% growth in traffic year-on-year.

One of the interesting trends to look at is where these rewards categories were sending traffic to during December. I have chosen to focus on some of the key shopping categories, and you can see from the graph below that there are some very disparate results between the rewards categories.

Department Stores like Amazon, Debenhams and John Lewis were the top recipients of traffic from price comparison sites, voucher sites and cashback sites. Social shopping sites on the other hand sent the greatest proportion of their traffic to fashion websites in the Apparel and Accessories category. The chart also reveals some categories which are served well by one particular type of rewards site but not others. Appliances and Electronics for example received 9.5% of all traffic leaving price comparison sites, but not nearly as much from the other rewards categories. Video and Games also received a much higher proportion of the traffic leaving voucher and cashback sites than from the rest of the reward websites.

This data is a great example of how Hitwise can be used to identify the best affiliates for your brand, depending on the industry you work in. It is just worth noting though that not all websites encourage clickthroughs to websites, and therefore looking at the total traffic they receive is more important than the downstream traffic of where visits go to after a visit to the reward website.

Our Christmas 2011 Retail Review is now available to download, and if you missed out on the Christmas webinars over December and January you can catch up with these now on our YouTube channel. You can also follow us on Twitter for the latest data updates.

Tweet Posted by James Murray at 12:03 PM | (0)
In Categories Retail | Shopping and Classifieds