E-commerce sites are the most frequent benefactors of paid search marketing, according to a study made by ComScore, leader in providing statistics-based research of the digital world. This study based on the March 2007 qSearch Marketer report shows that the top 10 paid search marketers are either online retailers or comparison shopping sites.
About 20 billion sponsored link exposures were generated in March from the top search engines, the top 16% of which are e-commerce sites. Leading the list was eBay.com with 802 million sponsored link exposures (4.1%) followed by Smarter.com with 366 million (1.9%), and Shopping.com with 357 million (1.8%).
“It’s clear that retail e-commerce sites are the most aggressive in using sponsored search to drive traffic to their sites,” James Lamberti, senior VP of comScore Search Solutions, said. “The top ten sites generating sponsored links — all of which are retail or comparison shopping sites — account for about one out of every six sponsored links served to U.S. Internet users. Given that retail e-commerce is now a $100 billion a year industry, it’s not surprising that top online retailers are willing to bid for premium placement at the major search engines.”
Based on the same study, Google accounted for 57.3% of the total referral activities (or click-thru rate), 53.8% of which were directed to, you got it, e-commerce sites.
Originally posted on June 6, 2007 @ 4:53 am
