MySpace Driving Traffic to Shopping and Classified Sectors ~ Advertising For Success

Hitwise recently announced that Google was the top U.S. search engine responsible for 14.93 percent of U.S. upstream visits to Shopping and Classifieds categories, while Yahoo! Search was the second most popular, accounting for 4.69 percent of upstream visits for the week ending August 26, 2006. The remaining Top Shopping and Classifieds websites were eBay, Amazon.com, Gateway, Walmart.com and Craigslist.

For the same time period ending August 26, 2006, social networking site MySpace.com accounted for 2.53 percent of all U.S. upstream visits to Shopping and Classifieds categories, up from 1.28 percent six months ago. In the past six months, the market share of visits to MySpace.com has increased 67 percent among all websites, and MySpace.com captured 4.88 percent of all U.S. visits for the week.

Bill Tancer, General Manager of Global Research at Hitwise, has this to say:

Search is a proven method of acquiring traffic and Google is the leader in driving online retail site traffic... with the growth of MySpace and others, online retailers should expand their focus beyond search to consider social networking sites as a source of additional traffic.