'Mapquest' Most Popular Search Term in U.S. Travel Industry in April
“Mapquest” was the most popular search term within the travel industry in the U.S. in April, representing 3.13% of all searches, market research firm Hitwise said in its latest report.
Of the top five searches that resulted in traffic to websites in the four weeks to April 24, 2010, “mapquest driving directions” ranked second with 2.03%, followed by “google maps” at 1.30%, “maps” at 0.96% and “southwest airlines” at 0.79%.
Top 10 Travel Websites
During the month of April 2010, Experian Hitwise reported:
The top five were: Google Maps, MapQuest, Expedia, Southwest Airlines and priceline.com.
Upstream Traffic From Search Engines
Search engines referred an average of 39.0% of upstream traffic to the travel online industry over the past six months up 9.1% compared to the overall internet average of 29.9%.
First, and accounting for 29.7% was Google. Far second was Yahoo! Search at 4.3%; Bing, third at 3.1%; Ask, fourth at 0.44%; and AOL Search, fifth at 0.38%.
Downstream Traffic From Search Engines
Downstream traffic to search engines from the travel online industry stood at 8.3% for the 6 months ending April, 2010, a 2.1% margin below the overall Internet average of 10.4%.
Again, Google came in first at 5.29%; Bing, second at 0.83%; Yahoo! Search, third at 0.77%;Google Images, fourth at 0.37%; and Ask, fifth at 0.26%.
Dwell Time
Average dwell time of visitors to the online travel industry was 7 minutes, 33 seconds for the month of April 2010 – a slight decrease from an average visit duration of 7 minutes, 40 seconds in previous months.
Fast Movers
Some local websites have sky rocketed in the four months ending April 2010. The biggest gainers, for instance, were: Hello Boston, an online guide to the city of Boston, including tourist information and news, up 1325 places; and Lake Compounce Theme Park, featuring information on the New England amusement park and its various rides, attractions and events — up 1,237 places.