Search remains king for retailers during this holiday season, with referrals from search engines responsible for driving the largest share of visits to the Retail 500. Last week, 30% of the upstream traffic to the Retail 500 was from search engines, up 6% from the same week last year. Google represented 72% of all search referred visits or 22% of the upstream traffic to the Retail 500. Cross-shopping across retailers and email also continue to be significant referral sources, representing 15% and 11% of traffic respectively.

Web-only retailers received the highest share of visits from search as compared to the Retail Chain 100 (e.g. brick & mortar retailers) and the Catalog/Call Center 100 (e.g. traditionally catalog businesses). The Catalog/Call Center 100 received the lowest share among the three types of retailers, receiving 25% of traffic from search for the week ending Dec. 20, 2008. Both the Web-only and Retail Chain categories received a higher share of traffic from search this year, increasing 5% and 9% respectively.

The Catalog/Call Center 100 received the lowest share of search-referred traffic as compared to the other groups, but also received a larger share of traffic from paid search for the 4 weeks ending Dec. 20, 2008. For this category, the top 100 paid search terms are dominated by the brands of the retailers, with ‘flowers’ and ‘guitars’ as the only generic search terms among them.