Traffic to Microsoft’s Zune jumps 185% in April, Nielsen says

Consumers still have a taste for Apple Inc. when shopping at hardware manufacturer sites, but more are expanding their menus to include Microsoft’s Zune. While Apple held on to its first place spot for unique visitors to hardware manufacturer retail sites in April with 48.7 million, Zune experienced the largest growth with a nearly 200% increase in traffic compared to a year earlier.

The top 10 hardware manufacturer shopping destinations with unique visitors in millions this year and last and growth from prior year, according to Nielsen Online were:

• Apple, 48.79, 44.03, 11%
• Hewlett Packard, 20.93, 17.30, 21%
• Dell, 14.74, 15.43, -4%
• Sun Microsystems, 4.81, 3.59, 34%
• IBM, 2.35, 2.32, 1%
• Gateway, 2.27, 1.72, 32%
• Zune, 1.65, .579, 185%
• Sony Computer Entertainment, 1.62, 1.04, 55%
• Simplyink 1.39, N/A, N/A
• Cisco Systems 1.22 1.31 -7%

Unique visitors count only once each shopper who came to a site, no matter how many times the shopper visited. This is a custom list compiled by Internet Retailer of the top online hardware manufacturer shopping destinations based on Nielsen Online data. Rankings may contain multiple web sites from the same retailer or manufacturer.

By length of visit, the top 10 online hardware manufacturer destinations in April (hours:minutes:seconds), according to Nielsen Online, were:

• Apple, 1:08:48
• Zune, 0:39:21
• Dell, 0:24:18
• IBM, 0:17:31
• Epson, 0:10:21
• Hewlett Packard, 0:10:19
• Netgear, 0:09:57
• Toshiba, 0:08:06
• Song Computer Entertainment, 0:06:59
• Gateway, 0:06:21

The top 10 retail goods and services advertisers by industry segments in terms of online ad impressions (in millions) in April, according to Nielsen data, were:

• Books, Movies and Music, 10,927.04
• Misc. Services, 3,649.22
• Home Improvement, 2, 117.15
• Auctions, 1,710.34
• Personal Care, 1,350.05
• Apparel & Jewelry, 967.91
• Electronics, 820.16
• Recreational Gear, 535.15
• Events and Tickets, 372.65
• Domestics, 289.77