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Google Maps Ascent Continues but MapQuest Remains Leader
October 03, 2008
Google Maps was just rated the leader in online mapping in a study by Cowen & Co. (as reported by Techcrunch). Despite being rated the leader in quality, Google Maps still trails MapQuest in share of US Internet visits.
The following chart illustrates Google's ascent nicely but also shows that MapQuest is by far the category leader.
Originally I had included Yahoo! Maps and Live Local on this chart but I ran it by the online maps guru, Mike Blumenthal, and he suggested that Yahoo! Local and Yahoo! Maps and Ask Maps and Live Local need to be aggregated to offer a fair comparison. Here's a chart comparing Google Maps, Mapquest, Yahoo! Maps aggregated with Yahoo! Local and Live Local aggregated with Ask Maps. The market share is reported among All Categories as Yahoo! Local is not included in our Maps category.
MapQuest recently revamped the homepage and launched some new features. Since then the site seems to be getting a lift in visits. As you can see from the week ending 6th September 2008, visits have been increasing steadily.
But why, if Google Maps reportedly offers a better user experience, do consumers stick with MapQuest? I blogged about this in January and since then Google Maps' traffic has continued to climb. At that time, I concluded the reason is "that Google.com is sending more traffic to Google Maps for high volume generic search terms and for variations on the MapQuest brand name."
In the four weeks to 27th September 2008, there were 64,286 unique search terms sending visits to Google Maps compared to 15,001 to MapQuest. Google.com sent nearly three times more visits to Google Maps than to MapQuest last week, with 1 in every 100 visits from Google going to Google Maps.
Google Maps is paying for some of this traffic. In the past four weeks, 23.31% of Google Maps' search traffic was paid compared to 12.19% for MapQuest.
It will be interesting to see if the lift in visits since the MapQuest redesign helps MapQuest to hold on to its dominant position.
Thanks to Matt McGee of Search Enine Land for pointing me to this story.
Posted by Heather Hopkins at 11:36 AM
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Comments
Thanks for the comment TP. We report our data by market (rather than globally) but if you are interested in mapping data for the UK, Australia and our other markets, we could look into it.
Thanks, Heather
Posted by Heather Hopkins | October 5, 2008 08:17 AM
I'd be interested in seeing what the hits are for licensed users of the above's mapping offerings.
I'm guessing it would be MapQuest by a mile, folowing by Google Maps and VE in a tight finish for 2nd.
Posted by Hugh Saalmans | October 12, 2008 04:32 PM
Has the overall usage of online mapping been growing over time? What are the actual # of hits?
Also what percentage of the population are using online mapping and how has this changed over the past few years with the growth of GPS?
Thanks,KM
Posted by KM | December 12, 2008 11:48 AM
Can you provide global numbers also? I wonder if the ranking is the same.
Posted by T. P. | October 3, 2008 07:10 PM