An increasing amount of traffic to e-commerce sites is coming from Google, according to new stats.
The proportion of visits shopping and classifieds sites received from the search engine almost doubled from 8.7% in May 2006 to 15.55% last month, Hitwise US reported.
Hitwise’s LeaAnn Prescott said the amount of traffic shopping e-commerce sites were getting from search engines overall, versus other sources, increased only 0.7% over the same period to 24.95%.
The discrepancy shows Google is continuing to forge a commanding lead in the search engine sector.
Google last week enjoyed a massive 78% UK market share, even though, of all the rival search engines, Yahoo! has gained quickest, boosting its share by 13% to rest on 8.6% of the market.
Prescott said Google’s “traffic, share of search, and impact on e-commerce websites have grown in lockstep over the past year”.
The biggest observation, however, is the arrival of MySpace as a truly significant source of customer leads for shopping sites, which now receive 3.15% of visits from the social networking site – up 86.1% over the year.
Prescott attributed the growth to either a general 67.1% increase in MySpace’s hits over the same period, shops doing more display advertising at the site or to the greater prevalence of retailers’ adverts via MySpace’s Google AdWords deal.
In March, we reportedTopShop.co.uk got 5% of its traffic from MySpace, for example. Of all indexed shopping sites, eBay got the vast majority of MySpace referrals.