Big Box Stores Are Loosing the Search Engine Battle to On-Line Entrepreneurs
During this past Holiday season, Internet-Engine examined the search results for 10 different product categories and visited over 2000 search results for the major search engines. Internet-Engine found that only 5% of the websites displayed by the search engines were for the Big Box Stores. Independent e-commerce stores represented almost a third (32%) of the websites found in the search results. Manufacturer websites and Shopping Comparison sites represented 21% each of the search results.
Thom Disch, Internet-Engine’s Founder and CEO stated that “These results go a long way toward explaining some confusing holiday sales data from ComScore and Hitwise.” On-line sales are up 26% during the just completed holiday season according to ComScore. The number of visits to the Hitwise Retail 100 Index* was up 5.9% for the 2006 online holiday shopping season. According to Disch, “The data show that the big box stores have made the decision not to participate in the search marketing programs such as the one created by search giant Google. On-line sales still only represent about 7% of total sales so this is a small part of the market, but it is the fastest growing market channel with several years of 25% plus sales growth.”
No. of Sites
Big Box Stores
Ecommerce Site
Manufacturer
Media Site
Comparison or Referral Site
Other
Watches
240
2.5%
40.8%
11.7%
1.3%
34.2%
9.6%
Ramps
170
0.0%
61.8%
10.6%
1.2%
10.0%
16.5%
Strollers
209
4.3%
50.2%
4.8%
0.0%
35.4%
5.3%
Power Drills
212
3.3%
42.9%
9.9%
2.8%
26.4%
14.6%
Treadmills
164
3.0%
18.3%
24.4%
9.1%
32.9%
12.2%
Digital Cameras
150
8.7%
12.7%
8.7%
6.0%
52.7%
11.3%
Snow Blowers
199
8.0%
27.1%
35.7%
11.6%
3.0%
14.6%
iPods
260
7.3%
7.7%
33.8%
18.8%
11.2%
21.2%
GPS Systems
246
6.9%
33.3%
26.0%
14.6%
4.5%
14.6%
Plasma TVs
158
8.9%
28.5%
41.1%
9.5%
3.8%
8.2%
Totals
2,008
5.3%
32.3%
20.8%
7.9%
20.6%
13.1%
Study Methodology
The Search Share Analysis™ by Internet-Engine evaluated search activity by an average searcher, starting with a high level/category type search (i.e., snow blowers), then refining the search for specific attributes (i.e., two-stage snow blowers) and, finally, looking at a specific brand/model (i.e., Toro 38630). The search terms were entered on the Google, Yahoo and MSN search engines and the results from the first page were analyzed. This typically included the top ten sponsored search results and the top ten naturally occurring, or “organic,” results.
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