Google Drives Web Traffic to Automotive Industry

Among the top three search engines, Google’s upstream Web traffic grew for the automotive, shopping and travel categories, according to Experian Hitwise, an online intelligence service.

by Staff

January 19, 2010

3 min to read

Among the top three search engines, Google’s upstream Web traffic grew for the automotive, shopping and travel categories, according to Experian Hitwise, an online intelligence service.

Google also accounted for 72.25 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending Jan. 2, 2010. Yahoo! Search, Bing and Ask.com received 14.83 percent, 8.92 percent and 2.54 percent, respectively. The remaining 66 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.48 percent of U.S. searches.

Percentage of U.S. searches among leading search engine providers
Domain	November 2009	December 2009	Month-over-month percentage change
www.google.com	71.57%	72.25%	1%
search.yahoo.com	15.39%	14.83%	-4%
www.bing.com*	9.34%	8.92%	-4%
www.ask.com	2.65%	2.54%	-4%
Note: Data is based on four-week rolling periods (ending Nov. 28, 2009, and Jan. 2, 2010) from the Hitwise sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users. Figures are for web searches only.
*This includes executed searches on Bing.com, Live.com and MSN Search but does not include searches on Club.Live.com.
Source: Experian Hitwise

Google is greatest source of traffic to key U.S. industries

Search engines continue to be the primary way Internet users navigate to key industry categories. Comparing December 2009 with December 2008, automotive, business and finance, entertainment, news and media, social networking and sports categories showed double-digit increases in their share of traffic coming directly from search engines.

Google was sending the most visits to the four categories below among the top three search engines. Google’s percentage of upstream traffic grew for the automotive, shopping and travel categories. Bing saw double-digit growth among all four categories and Yahoo! Search saw double-digit growth in the shopping category, as seen in the table below.

Percentage of U.S. upstream traffic from search engines among verticals
	Google			Yahoo! Search			Bing*
Domain	Dec. 2008	Dec. 2009	YOY % change	Dec. 2008	Dec. 2009	YOY % change	Dec. 2008	Dec. 2009	YOY % change
Automotive	18.77%	21.13%	13%	4.30%	3.82%	-11%	1.27%	2.26%	78%
Health	31.91%	31.09%	-3%	6.31%	4.73%	-25%	1.70%	3.29%	94%
Shopping	18.36%	19.95%	9%	4.26%	4.73%	11%	1.31%	2.25%	72%
Travel	27.09%	29.55%	9%	4.99%	4.02%	-19%	1.88%	2.78%	48%
Note: Data is based on monthly upstream traffic from the Hitwise sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users. Figures are for web searches only.
*This includes executed searches on Bing.com, Live.com and MSN Search but does not include searches on Club.Live.com.
Source: Experian Hitwise

Shorter searches are flat this past month

Shorter search queries, averaging searches of one to four words in length, were flat between November and December 2009. Searches of one and two words increased 1 percent. The same time period showed that longer search queries — those averaging five to more than eight words long — were down 2 percent from month to month. Searches of one word comprised the majority of searches, amounting to 24.34 percent of all queries.

Percentage of U.S. clicks by number of keywords
Subject	November 2009	December 2009	Month-over-month percentage change
One word	24.13%	24.34%	1%
Two words	23.14%	23.41%	1%
Three words	20.37%	20.32%	0%
Four words	13.84%	13.79%	0%
Five words	8.13%	8.02%	-1%
Six words	4.43%	4.37%	-1%
Seven words	2.43%	2.37%	-2%
Eight or more words	3.54%	3.38%	-5%
Note: Data is based on four-week rolling periods (ending Nov. 28, 2009, and Jan. 2, 2010) from the Hitwise sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users.
Source: Experian Hitwise

Topics:Web traffic automotive industry Digital F&I

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