Search Engines Responsible For 26 Percent Of Retail Website Visits

Nintendo Wii Still Top Product Search Term, Baby Alive Cracks Top 10

NEW YORK, NY – December 5^th, 2006 

Hitwise, the world's leading online competitive intelligence service, today announced that search engines accounted for 25.79 percent of visits going to the Hitwise Shopping and Classifieds category for the week ending December 2, 2006. Direct competitive traffic, from other Shopping and Classifieds websites, accounted for 25.72 percent of upstream visits, followed by Email Services at 9.6 percent and Rewards and Directories (including comparison shopping sites) at 5.63 percent in the same period. 

Google was the leading search engine sending visits to Shopping and Classifieds websites, accounting for 16.04 percent of upstream visits for the week ending December 2, 2006, followed by Yahoo! Search at 4.84 percent and MSN Search at 2.22 percent.

The Shopping and Classifieds sub-categories receiving the largest percentage of traffic from search engines for the week ending December 2, 2006 were Intimate Apparel and Accessories (36.02 percent of upstream traffic from search), House and Garden (32.32 percent) and Grocery and Alcohol (32.28 percent).

Net Communities and Chat websites, which includes social networking websites such as MySpace, are playing a much larger role in driving retail traffic than a year ago, accounting for 6.16 percent for the week ending December 2, 2006.  MySpace accounted for 2.07 percent of visits to Shopping and Classifieds websites for this past week and was the eighth most popular website sending visits to the Shopping and Classifieds category.

“In 2006 the means by which retail sites drive traffic to their site continues to change,” said Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise. “For the third year in a row we’ve seen search grow as a referral source to our Shopping and Classifieds category, while social networking websites such as MySpace now represent a major source of retail traffic as they become a key component of Internet use.”

Online HolidayShopping Update:

Visits Increased 4.4 Percent Last Week to Hitwise Retail 100 Index^[1] Compared to Last Year, Nintendo Wii Remains Most Searched Product Term  

• This week, the Hitwise US Retail 100 Index chart shows that visits to the websites within the Index were up 4.4 percent for the week ending December 2, 2006versus the same week last year (December 3, 2005).
• Amazon.com regained the top spot as the most visited website within our Index for last week, with Walmart moving down one spot. Shopzilla.com moved into the top 15 for the first time coming in at number 12. HomeDepot.com re-entered the top 15 list at number 15.
• Nintendo Wii remained the top product search term for the second straight week and this past week claimed the top two spots. The product term ‘baby alive’ was among the most popular product searches for the week ending December 2, 2006for the first time this holiday season.

About Hitwise

Hitwise is the leading online competitive intelligence service. Only Hitwise provides its 1,200 global clients with daily insights on how their customers interact with a broad range of competitive websites, and how their competitors use different tactics to attract online customers.

Since 1997, Hitwise has pioneered a unique, network-based approach to Internet measurement. Through relationships with ISPs around the world, Hitwise’s patented methodology captures the anonymous online usage, search, and conversion behavior of 25 million Internet users. This unprecedented volume of Internet usage data is seamlessly integrated into our easy to use, web-based service, designed to help marketers better plan, implement, and report on a range of online marketing programs.

Hitwise is a privately held company headquartered in New York City and operates in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, and Singapore. More information about Hitwise is available at www.hitwise.com.

For up to date analysis of online trends and statistics, please visit the Hitwise Intelligence Analyst Weblogs at weblogs.hitwise.com and the Hitwise Data Center at www.hitwise.com/datacenter.