Dell slips a notch in top 10 computer sites as traffic contracts

Top 500 Guide

A year ago, Dell.com was the second most visited web site for computer hardware manufacturers and traffic had grown by 10% from a year earlier. Reflecting the stumbles that Dell has experienced since then, the company is now No. 3 with traffic having shrunk by 5% in the past year, says the latest report on unique visitors to hardware manufacturers’ sites from Nielsen/NetRatings.

Here’s how Nielsen/NetRatings ranks hardware manufacturers’ web sites by unique visitors in February (unique visitors count only once each shopper who came to a site, no matter how many time that shopper visited), with February this year, February last year and percent growth (in thousands):

• Apple, 41,850, 34,211, 22%
• Hewlett Packard, 16,369, 13,248, 24%
• Dell, 13,967, 14,705, -5%
• Sun Microsystems, 3,229, 3,975, -19%
• IBM, 2,023, 2,873, -30%
• Gateway, 1,941, 2,329, -17%
• Nintendo, 1,631, 856, 91%
• Linksys, 1,558, 1,099, 42%
• Palm, 1,400, 1,491, -6%
• EPSON, 1,359, 1,389, -2%

Time per visitor is often a good measure of how engaging a site is. It’s particularly important at computer manufacturer sites, which sell complicated products that take some time for the user to understand and configure. The top 10 computer hardware sites by time spent per visitor (hours, minutes, seconds) in February were:

• Apple, 1:08:47
• Dell, 0:19:49
• IBM, 0:16:05
• Creative, 0:14:26
• Palm, 0:12:38
• Nintendo, 0:12:27
• XBOX, 0:11:10
• Hewlett Packard, 0:11:02
• TiVo, 0:10:31
• Gateway, 0:09:26

• Books, Movies & Music, 7,272.96
• Misc. Services, 6,924.28
• Personal Care, 3,943.53
• Auctions, 1,845.46
• Electronics, 1,817.78
• Flowers & Gifts, 1,685.14
• Home Improvement, 1,279.57
• Apparel & Jewelry, 956.44
• Art Prints & Posters, 422.14
• Web Services, 329.93
• Total, 28,819.06