GOOGLE RESPONSIBLE FOR 10.8% OF ALL VISITS TO E-TAILERS
Barbie, American Girl and Build-A-Bear Top Toy Searches
NEW YORK, Dec. 7, 2005— As visits to online retail sites continue to accelerate into the 2005 holiday season, search continues to be a leading source for visits to Shopping & Classifieds sites.
According to Hitwise, the world's leading online competitive intelligence service, Search Engines and Directories contributed 17.9 percent of all visits to the Shopping & Classifieds category for the week ending December 3, 2005. Google led search engine referrals by providing 10.8 percent of visits to online retailers, while Yahoo! Search and MSN Search provided 4.1 percent and 0.8 percent respectively. For the week ending December 3, 2005, the largest category sending visits to Shopping & Classifieds sites was shopping sites themselves at 49.5 percent, indicating that Internet users are visiting multiple retailers within an Internet session.
"Search referrals to shopping sites continue to grow as we enter the key holiday shopping weeks," said Bill Tancer General Manager of Global Research at Hitwise. "However, even with the impressive growth of search, the fact that almost 50 percent of visits to shopping sites originate from other shopping sites demonstrates that consumers continue to manually search and compare across several online retailers. Search engines and comparison shopping sites should consider this manual search behavior as proof of demand for better shopping and comparison search."
Barbie, American Girl and Build a Bear Remain Hot Toy Searches in 2005
Top product search terms driving traffic to the Shopping & Classifieds - Toys and Hobbies category for the four weeks ending December 3, 2005 were "barbie", "american girl" and "build a bear". When compared with top terms from 2004, new entrants to the top ten were "airsoft guns" and "jigsaw puzzles". Top search terms driving traffic to the Shopping & Classifieds - Appliances and Electronics category for the four weeks ending December 3, 2005 were dominated by variations in "ipod" and "xbox 360" search terms.
"As we've seen in previous years, top search terms for toys and electronics leading into the last weeks of the year are a great indicator of what will be on consumer's holiday shopping lists," said Bill Tancer. "Given the prevalence of search as a driver to online shopping sites, search term data is an invaluable tool for the online and offline retailer as to what they should be stocking this holiday season."
Leading Search Terms to Shopping & Classifieds - Toys and Hobbies Websites
Period - Four Weeks Ending December 4, 2004 versus Four Weeks Ending December 3, 2005
Toy Search terms - 2004
Toy Search Terms - 2005
barbie
barbie
american girl
american girl
yugioh
build a bear
build a bear
airsoft guns
bratz
lego
hello kitty
hot wheels
hot wheels
bratz
my little pony
yugioh
homies
jigsaw puzzles
model trains
hello kitty
Weekly Holiday Shopping Tracker:
Data period: week ending December 3, 2005
U.S visits to retail websites accounted for 10.55 percent of all visits to the Internet.
Top growing retail categories last week were: Health and Beauty (up 14.8%), Books (up 7.2%), Sports and Fitness (up 5.5%), Classifieds (up 3.94%) Grocery and Alcohol (up 3.9%), and Apparel and Accessories (up 3.8 %).
Retail (10.55 percent) was the second most popular online category after Adult (16.55%). Retail is again ahead of Email sites (8.8 percent).
The leading product-related search terms driving traffic to retail websites were "ipod", "lingerie", "xbox 360", "toys", "mp3 players", "furniture", "dell computers", "ipod nano", "tires", "cell phones".
Hitwise U.S. Data
Top 15 Shopping & Classifieds Websites (ranked by % of total Visits)
Rank By Visits for Week Ending 12/03/05
Rank
Name
Domain
Market Share
% growth weekly (w/e 12/03/05 compared to w/e 11/26/05)
1.
eBay
www.ebay.com
19.42%
5.70%
2.
Amazon.com
www.amazon.com
3.31%
9.34%
3.
Walmart.com
www.walmart.com
2.02%
-32.56%
4.
Target
www.target.com
1.38%
-13.57%
5.
Dell USA
www.dell.com
1.28%
-13.01%
6.
BestBuy.com
www.bestbuy.com
1.09%
-33.91%
7.
Craig's List
www.craigslist.org
1.05%
9.26%
8.
JC Penney
www.jcpenney.com
0.86%
16.81%
9.
CircuitCity.com
www.circuitcity.com
0.82%
-36.77%
10.
Overstock.com
www.overstock.com
0.72%
10.07%
11.
Sears.com
www.sears.com
0.71%
-9.80%
12.
Shopping.com
www.shopping.com
0.69%
5.94%
13.
BizRate.com
www.bizrate.com
0.67%
2.11%
14.
Shopzilla
www.shopzilla.com
0.62%
14.02%
15.
NetFlix.com
www.netflix.com
0.61%
6.82%
*Does not include stand-alone visits to other eBay sites ( eBay Motors, eBay Stores)
**Only includes visits to these stand-alone sites www.shopping.com and www.bizrate.com and not other Shopping.com or Shopzilla owned properties.
Contact: For media inquiries or to schedule an analyst interview, please contact Lizzie Babarczy: press@hitwise.com (212) 380 2910.
About Hitwise:
Hitwise is the world's leading online competitive intelligence service. Each day, Hitwise monitors how more than 25 million Internet users interact with over 500,000 websites across 160 industry categories.
By monitoring more people, more websites, more often, Hitwise provides marketers with timely and actionable marketing insights on how their online presence compares to competitive websites. Companies use this information to maximize the return on their online investment, in efforts such as search marketing, affiliate programs, online advertising, visitor segmentation, content development and lead generation.
Hitwise collects Internet usage information via a combination of ISP data partnerships and opt-in mega panels, and complies with local and international privacy legislation as audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Founded in 1997, Hitwise is a privately held company, headquartered in New York City and operates in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore.
More information about Hitwise is available at www.hitwise.com. For up to date analysis on online trends, please visit the Hitwise Intelligence Analyst Weblogs at http://weblogs.hitwise.com.
Home 
