I got an email from MediaPost that lays out the actual percentages of search traffic to overall traffic on major online retailers; I find this very interesting as some of these are  competitors (ie: Yahoo News / Google News).

Retailers’ Percent of Traffic from Search

    • eBay: 18 percent
    • Amazon: 31 percent
    • Wal-Mart: 21 percent
    • Target: 26 percent
    • NetFlix.com: 10 percent
    • Dell: 18 percent
    • BestBuy: 21 percent
    • Ticketmaster: 13 percent
    • Overstock.com: 22 percent
    • JC Penney: 23 percent


Weighted Average: 20 percent

Source: Hitwise, excerpted from Top 20 Retail Websites, week ending April 15, 2006


News/Media Site’s Percent of Traffic from Search

  • Yahoo! News: 3 percent
  • The Weather Channel - US: 10 percent
  • MSNBC: 8 percent
  • CNN.com: 12 percent
  • Yahoo! Weather: 5 percent
  • Google News: 69 percent
  • Drudge Report: 7 percent
  • USA Today: 14 percent
  • New York Times: 15 percent
  • BBC News: 19 percent

Weighted Average: 13 percent Source: Hitwise, excerpted from Top 20 News and Media Websites, week ending April 15, 2006

These numbers, in some cases, sound pretty low; I would think Dell would be getting more than 18% of all their traffic from Search Engines.  And why does Yahoo News only get 3% of it’s traffic from Search while Google News gets 69% (some positioning!).