Google takes lead in delivering shoppers to retail sites, says WebSideStory

Google has significantly boosted its market share in delivering shoppers to retail sites, says a survey of shopping search results from WebSideStory Inc. Google delivered 27.16% of retail-related searchers to retailers’ sites in the first 11 months of the year, WebSideStory reports.

The four major search sites--Google, Yahoo, MSN and America Online--delivered 92.8% of all retail searches. Yahoo referred 25.92% of shoppers, MSN, 24.11% and AOL, 15.6%.

Yahoo has given up market share to every other major search site in the past year, according to the WebSideStory statistics. A year ago, Google delivered 18.46% of shoppers for a gain this year of 8.7 points of market share; while Yahoo delivered 41.41% a year ago for a loss of 15.49 points, MSN, 15.41% a year ago for a gain of 8.7 points, and AOL, 8.51%, for a gain of 7 points.

"This is critical information for retailers who are planning any type of online marketing campaign this holiday season," said Geoff Johnston, vice president of product marketing for WebSideStory’s StatMarket, which is a provider of data on global Internet user trends. "Search engines still represent the best source of new visitors." WebSideStory provides outsourced Web analytics. StatMarket aggregates information from millions of Internet surfers each day who visit 100,000 sites worldwide using WebSideStory`s HitBox outsourced web analytics services. For this report, StatMarket analyzed visitor data from more than 6,000 shopping sites, ranging from small online gift shops to giant retailers.

After the top four the next biggest referrer of shoppers was Netscape with 1.4%. CompuServe, Dogpile, Ask Jeeves, Lycos and LookSmart all delivered less than 1%, according to WebSideStory.