The first wave of stimulus rebates via direct deposit has curious consumers checking out the IRS website to find out when to expect their checks. The market share of visits to IRS.gov jumped 124% for the week ending May 3, 2008 from the previous week and continued to rise another 15% for the week ending May 10, 2008. Consumers are largely using search to navigate to the IRS website – one-third of the traffic for the past two weeks originated from search engines. Not surprisingly, 4 of the top 10 search terms sending traffic to the IRS website were related to the rebate checks (others were navigational).

Some consumers must be seeing the answer that they want – 11.37% of the traffic from IRS.gov visited the Banks & Financial Institutions category immediately after for the week ending May 10, 2008; most likely confirming if funds have been deposited. Conversely, almost 11% of the traffic to the IRS.gov website was also coming from Banks & Financial Institutions, possibly after not seeing any funds deposited into their accounts.

Now that the rebate checks are starting to appear in wallets, where will they be spent? I have been seeing many emails from retailers with plenty of suggestions!