One feature about HitWise is the ability to see where people come from before they arrive on a site and where they once they leave a site.   With my house plan clients I was able to see, according to a HitWise study handed to me last year by Shane Mulane, that visitors left eplans.com and went to another houseplans site and vice versa.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the luxury of having HitWise to play with on a regular basis, but John Batelle does get a lot of good stuff that HitWise sends him in cluding a down stream analysis of  8.2% of traffic leaving MySpace.com and going to Google .  John makes a big deal about that but I’m not sure that information is very helpful as some people will always go to a search engine after leaving a site.

From the Hitwise blog: The chart (above) illustrates the percentage upstream from myspace.com to Google.
Going back to the beginning of last year myspace provided less than 1% of all Google traffic.
While myspace.com still doesn’t have its own search offering, the shear volume of traffic sent to external search engines could be directed internally with the right acquisition and promotion of its own search offering.

There are a lot of other insights in the piece. I’ve had MySpace again on my mind after talking Weds with Jon Miller, CEO of AOL. My full interview with him will be up on B2.0 in about a month, but the thing that struck me was how Miller mentioned MySpace in the same breath as Google, AOL, Yahoo, eBay, and Amazon. It had made it into the majors as far as he was concerned, because it owned the social networking space. And why, again, might Google launch Co-op, and AOL AIM Pages? Indeed….

What I see is that visitors to MySpace are not finding all that they want on the site and are going back to Google for additional searches, more and more.