The holiday shopping season is in full swing, and aggressive search marketing on the part of comparison shopping sites is paying off. Google and Yahoo! Search sent 25 percent more visits to the ten leading shopping comparison sites versus last year (week ending November 19, 2005 versus the week ending November 20, 2004), according to Hitwise.
U.S visits to retail websites accounted for 9.32 percent of all visits to the Internet, last week, and the top growing retail categories were:
Flowers and Gifts (up 13.4%); Ticketing (up 11.5%); Department Stores (up 10.5%); Rewards and Directories (up 9.7%) and Appliances and Electronics (up 8.3%).
Other data from Hitwise:
Retail (9.32 percent) was the second most popular online category after Adult (16.8%). Retail is again ahead of Email sites (8.9 percent).
The leading product-related search terms driving traffic to retail Web sites were "ipod," "furniture," "auto parts," "lingerie," "tires," "toys," "mp3 players," "xbox 360," "flowers" and "ipod mini."
Hitwise offers more holiday related stats over on the Hitwise Intelligence blog.
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