Retail Sites Are Strong in August
Thanks to the end of summer and the start of back-to-school season, the retail industry had a strong August, according to data from both Compete and comScore.
Compete’s data for August shows that overall traffic to retail sites was up, with sites like zappos.com (+30.3 percent), jcpenney.com (+24.8 percent), kohls.com (+23.8 percent), gap.com (+19.6 percent), staples.com (+13 percent) and target.com (+6.2 percent) standing above the crowd.
Data from comScore affirms this trend, with Retail – Books seeing an 11 percent boost in traffic from July to August, while Retail – Consumer Goods, Retail – Apparel and Retail – Jewelry/Luxury Goods/Accessories each saw a 5 percent increase. Retail – Food saw a 4 percent increase in unique visitors.
For Retail Books sites, Barnes & Noble finished with 8.3 million visitors in August (+13 percent), followed by Borders Group, Inc. with 3 million visitors, BookSpan Property with 2.3 million visitors and AbeBooks with 1.6 million visitors (+45 percent). Chegg.com, the surging textbook-rental site, saw its audience boom 290 percent to 1.4 million in August.
For Retail Consumer Goods sites, Staples.com Sites was tops with 8 million visitors (+16 percent), followed by Office Depot with 5.1 million (+20 percent), QVC Sites with 4.3 million and OfficeMax with 2.9 million (+32 percent).
Compete also noticed an increase in the popularity of answers sites, with reference.com seeing 12 million unique visitors (+18.2 percent), and faqs.org saw its unique audience grow 15.5 percent. Dictionary.com saw its August traffic surge 31 percent month-over-month and 689 percent year-over-year.
Despite the season for vacations blossoming in August, major map sites saw dips in traffic, with mapquest.com and MSN’s mapblast.com seeing significant declines.
Compete’s Chris Bulger, data product manager, conjectures that this might be due to the increasing use of embedded map features on other sites. “For instance, if you conduct a search for ‘Boston, MA,’ the actual map will often be displayed as part of the search results without searchers having to navigate to a map site.”
NFL Internet Group was a big winner in August, according to comScore, as it doubled its audience of unique visitors to 19.5 million. Berkshire Hathaway also saw a big month, with the number of its unique visitors increasing 37 percent to 10.3 million, while LimeWire.com saw a 27 percent boost in the size of its audience, which reached 9.8 million in August.
While comScore ranked the top U.S. online properties as Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and AOL, Compete ranked them as Google, Yahoo, Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia.
BrightRoll Video Network topped comScore’s Ad Focus Ranking with a potential reach of 99.2 percent, followed by TubeMogul Video Ad Platform with 97.2 percent and SpotXchange Video Ad Network with 96.9 percent.
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