Nielsen Data on CSE Unique Visitors

An article at SeekingAlpha sites both search and comparison shopping data from Nielsen for April of this year. In the search world, you may be surprised to hear that Google still owns the majority of searches. On the CSE side, there are some surprising and some not-so-surprising tidbits:

Not Surprising:

• MSN Live/Cashback is up over 600% versus last year. Apparently, giving away money makes you more popular.
• Many engines saw a decine in visits. Fewer shoppers in a bad economy, plus Google changes have hurt traffic for some engines.
• Google down year over year. That's what happens when you move the shopping link into the drop down. I noticed this week it is back in plain view on all SERPs.

Surprising:

• Shopping.com and PriceGrabber both nowhere to be found in this data. We see much more traffic and revenue from those sites than we do from Pronto, Smarter or Become, but those sites do get a lot of traffic from their affiliate networks so maybe this could go under not surprising.
• Bizrate and Shopzilla are listed separately despite being the same company using the same product data. When combined, they are second only to NexTag, which I assume was listed separately from Calibex.
• Become.com saw a decrease of 43% year over year. Since they increased their CPC rates earlier this year, it seems they would have more money to acquire more traffic, unless they lost a large number of merchants due to the increased rates. Also, we've seen an increase in traffic coming from Become.com recently, so even if their uniques have drops, perhaps their CTR has increased.

Comments

[Steven]

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[Siva Kumar]

I agree with the caution you raise in your coverage that having Shopping.com and PriceGrabber.com not present does not provide this data with credibility.

It's possible that these sites were omitted after all the coverage of Nielsen was to show how MSFT's LIVE search/Cashback had grown over the year and not to compare it to the other services.

-Siva