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Friday, December 01, 2006 |
Getting to an online retail storefront doesn't always involve going straight to
the front door, as many people depend on the traffic cops of search to point them
in the right direction.
Editor's Note: Something you already knew about search traffic
received some affirmation from Hitwise, as they observed 25 percent of traffic
to online retailers started from a query at a search engine. Do you use search
to online shop? Let us know at WebProWorld.
That direction from the major search engines would be upstream, as 25 percent of traffic received by over 19,000 retailers starts with a query in a search box. MarketWatch's Bambi Francisco cited Bill Tancer of Hitwise, who noted this in an interview.
"Even big-brand retailers rely on search engines for traffic," Francisco said. "About 12% of Wal-Mart.com traffic visited Google first, according to Hitwise."
Keep in mind that Wal-Mart's website staggered under the traffic from Thanksgiving holiday visitors. It may be the search traffic that pushed their powerful infrastructure to the point of boiling into slag.
The observations Tancer made indicate why search has become so competitive, why Yahoo has been feverishly updating its search marketing products, and why Microsoft has joined the paid search game with its adCenter product. Internet users depend on search, and retailers depend on that traffic.
Social networks have become jumping-off points for people to get to a retailer site. Hitwise found that five percent of the upstream traffic to online businesses arrived from a social network.
Out of that five percent, MySpace accounted for 2.5 percent.
Email has been much maligned due to the overwhelming spam problems experienced
by people around the globe. But in the US, email drives more traffic to retailers
than social networks do, almost doubling that by moving nine percent of upstream
visits to them.
About
the Author:
David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. |
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Search Engines Acknowledge World AIDS Day
 By
Chris Richardson
Staff Writer | WebProNews
The statistics involved with the AIDS epidemic are staggering. A visit to any
AIDS awareness site confirms this. 6000 children orphaned daily because of AIDS…
180,000 in a month… The facts are almost overwhelming. Because of the need for
AIDS awareness on a worldwide scale, December 1 is acknowledged as being World
AIDS Day.
 The
search engine industry is also doing their part to improve AIDS awareness by visually
supporting today’s cause. Google,
Ask.com, and Yahoo
all have red ribbon-based images on their start pages. Unfortunately, Live.com
(MSN Search) is conspicuous by their absence, which is odd considering how much
of a philanthropist Bill Gates has become.
Google’s support of today’s occasion manifests itself in the form of
(RED) Campaign support, complete with a logo
and a link to the Join
Red site.
Aside: the (RED)
Campaign supports AIDS Awareness by partnering with certain product manufacturers
(Apple, Motorola, Converse to name a few). If an item that’s marked for (RED)
support is sold, a portion of the profits goes to The Global Fund.
Meanwhile, Ask.com is sporting a red
ribbon that links to an Ask
SERP featuring an Answer section reserved for the World
AIDS Day website. Yahoo is also supporting the (RED) campaign and their
logo linking to a Yahoo
Shopping page featuring (RED) items and donation links. It’s refreshing to
see the search community reach out in such a manner. When you consider just how
much traffic these vessels drive, it’s easier to hope people are at least vicariously
coming into contact with this important information.
About
the Author:
Chris Richardson is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. |
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Questions or Comments About the Upcoming Chicago SES
We will be attending the Chicago Search Engine Strategies Conference, which takes
place next week. This is something we are looking forward to a great deal and
we were wondering if you had any comments or questions you'd like to see addressed
by our conference team. We will have a number of opportunities to get relay your
message, so if you are interested, check out Mike's
post containing all the necessary contact information. Let us know about the
questions you've been dying to know the answers to.
Subscribe
to the WebProWorld Feed 
|| Chris||
SES
Chicago 2006
Next week we'll be hitting the road again for the Search
Engine Strategies in Chicago. We have been getting a lot of great feedback
from our video
coverage of PubCon this month and we hope to keep the videos rolling for SES
as well.
With that in mind, I wanted to open up a thread to see what kinds of questions
people might like to see asked. As you all know (or should) you can't even turn
around without running into an SEO/SEM guru, expert or enthusiast at SES shows
-and Chicago figures to be no exception. As such, I'm expecting a target rich
environment for the camera.
It's going to be an incredible collection of search engine brain power. If a comet
were to strike the building during the show, it's unlikely that anybody would
be able to find anything on the internet again for at least 5 years. I can't name
off all of the folks who will be speaking/attending, but you can check out their
agenda
links and see for yourself.
If you have any burning questions or mind boggling concepts you'd like to see
put to the crowd at SES, now's the time to let me know.
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Catching The Buzz
at PubCon
 Drinkbait
takes the process of catching the viral buzz to a whole new level. The premise
of the game is simple, buy a drink for as many SEOs as you can, take pictures
to document the beverage experience... |
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