Flowers/Gifts/Greetings and Automotive Sites Benefit from Surges in February
The Super Bowl and Valentine’s Day were good for traffic to related sites in February, according to comScore. Also, tax sites saw big gains in traffic and Yahoo Sites finished atop the list of the top 50 Web properties.
According to comScore, Business/Finance – Taxes was the top-gaining site category in February, attracting 33.1 million unique visitors, up 24 percent from the previous month.
Retail – Flowers/Gifts/Greetings followed with an 18 percent month-over-month gain, while Automotive – Manufacturer gained 11 percent and Services – e-cards gained 10 percent.
For the Retail – Flowers/Gifts/Greetings category, AmericanGreetings was the top-gaining property in February, followed by ProFlowers.com and Gifts.com. For the Services – e-cards category, MyFunCards.com experienced the biggest month-over-month surge in visitors, followed by AG Interactive and Evite.com. Both categories were helped, of course, by Valentine’s Day.
Meanwhile, the top automotive site in February belonged to General Motors. Toyota, Ford Motor Company and Honda followed. These sites were boosted thanks largely to Super Bowl advertising. Subaru saw its website’s audience grow 469 percent to 2.2 million unique visitors, thanks to its sponsorship of Animal Planet’s “Puppy Bowl.”
Yahoo Sites finished the month as the top Web property in the U.S. with 177.5 million unique visitors. Google Sites followed with 175.2 million visitors, while Microsoft Sites welcomed 168.8 million visitors.
Facebook.com boasted 150.7 million unique visitors in February, followed by AOL with 107.4 million, Ask Network with 92.7 million, Turner Digital with 89 million, Glam Media with 84.1 million, Viacom Digital with 83.7 million and CBS Interactive with 78.6 million.
Expedia made its debut in the list of the top-50 Web properties in February at No. 43, as did The Washington Post Company at No. 48, and Twitter.com at No. 49.
According to comScore, there were 209.9 million total unique Internet users in the U.S. in February.
Google Ad Network led comScore’s Ad Focus ranking in February with a reach of 92.3 percent of the total Internet audience, followed by AOL Advertising with 84.6 percent and Yahoo Sites with 84.6 percent.
Yahoo Network Plus was fourth with a reach of 84.1 percent, while Turn Media Platform was fifth with a reach of 80.1 percent.
Google (79.6 percent), ValueClick Networks (78.5 percent), 24/7 Real Media (77.5 percent), AdBrite (72.1 percent) and Facebook.com (71.8 percent) rounded out the top 10.
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