Retailers get more traffic from social sites than search engines

The UK's top retailers are receiving more traffic from social network MySpace than top search engines like MSN and Yahoo!, according to research company Hitwise.

The news will be of interest to retailers that plough online budget into affiliate and search marketing.

TopShop has started rolling out MySpace profile pages for its local branches around the UK, beginning with a presence for its Glasgow branch. Last week 4.63% of visitors to topshop.com arrived from MySpace, making the News Corporation-owned social network third behind Google and MSN Hotmail.

Meanwhile, fashion site ASOS received more visits from MySpace than Yahoo! Search and MSN UK Search combined. The social network accounted for 4.88% of all traffic to asos.com, almost equalling the combined total of visits from MSN UK share of Asos audience coming from top referrers (%)Search, Yahoo! Search and MSN's portal, which together drove 4.89%.

Google accounts for the vast majority of visits to retailers, but MySpace and Bebo are taking on search providers.

MySpace has typically been viewed as a driver of traffic to music stores, in line with the site's demographic. However, visitors to HMV.co.uk and Play.com are less likely to arrive from MySpace than those arriving at fashion retailers' sites.

Only 1.81% of visits to Play.com come from MySpace, while 2.51% of visits to HMV.co.uk came from the social network.

Social network Bebo has also seen increased levels of traffic visiting retailers. Last week it rose to fifth place in the most popular source for visitors to ASOS.com, accounting for 3.14% of all visits.

www.nma.co.uk Andrew McCormick 2007-03-15