How have sources of traffic to Shopping and Classifieds websites changed over the past year? In May 2007, the Hitwise Shopping & Classifieds category received 24.95% of its upstream visits from search engines. This number increased by only 0.7% since May 2006, but the balance of search engines sending traffic has changed in favor of Google. Google was responsible for 15.55% of Shopping & Classifieds upstream visits in May 2007, an increase of 8.7% since May 2006. Google’s traffic, share of search, and impact on e-commerce websites have grown in lockstep over the past year.

MySpace is another growing source of traffic for shopping websites. In May 2007, 3.15% of Shopping & Classifieds site visits originated at MySpace, an increase of 86.1% since May 2006. This increase could be attributable to several factors: 1) the sheer increase in visits to MySpace (up 67.1% from May 06 – May 07, vs. the 6.6% increase in visits to the Shopping & Classifieds category), resulting in more non-referred traffic, 2) increased retailer advertising on MySpace, 3) the Google-MySpace search deal, which may have led to more general web searching on MySpace as well more potential retail contextual ads. The leading Shopping & Classifieds websites in MySpace’s downstream for the month of May largely resemble the top overall retail websites – 7 of the websites shown in the table below were also top 10 Shopping & Classifieds sites in May 2007.