This month we released the Hitwise US Travel Report, which included a section on the impact of metasearch engines like Kayak, and showed how to use the Hitwise clickstream tool to monitor affiliate traffic. Since the report was released, the clickstream product was upgraded, making it even easier to get an understanding of clickstream on a category level.
The market share of visits to Kayak has increased by 64% in the past 6 months (week ending 8/26/06 vs. week ending 2/25/06). In the US Travel Report we showed the downstream categories from Kayak, which for the most recent week were Travel Agencies and Transport sites (includes airlines and car rental sites).

When I wrote the report, I was surprised to see that Agencies accounted for nearly twice as much of Kayak’s downstream as Transport sites, as Kayak’s original purpose is to aggregate airline and hotel information from all the providers and send traffic to those providers. However, agencies are also providing data to Kayak, as well as advertising on the site. By clicking on “Agencies” in the above table in Hitwise, we can see exactly which agencies Kayak is sending the most traffic to:

We can also now easily generate clickstream charts by clicking on the boxes you see above. I’ve been using these charts a lot to show the impact of an affiliate or advertiser on a site or category. Below is a clickstream chart of Kayak’s impact on the Travel Agency category. We see that Kayak accounted for 0.73% of all upstream traffic to Travel Agency sites in the most recent week, and that percentage is up 117% from 0.34% six months ago, during the week ending February 25, 2006.

Clearly Kayak is a significant force in driving traffic to travel sites, and using clickstream data can help shed light on how it is affecting the category. I used Kayak in planning my upcoming vacation – I was able to find good deals on both my flight and my rental car that I might not have found otherwise. I’ll be driving around a distant island in a convertible for the next week and a half, and will come back in September refreshed with some new ideas on how to use the new clickstream tool!