Back in February, my colleague Heather Hopkins wrote about the shrinking gap in visits between the two leading online maps, Google Maps and MapQuest. As of the week ending April 11, 2009, Google Maps has now edged past MapQuest with a higher market share of visits. While the share of visits is higher for Google Maps, the average visit time on MapQuest remained higher at 10 minutes and 51 seconds as compared to 7 minutes and 24 seconds on Google Maps. Google is the top referral sources for both websites, but is considerably higher for Google Maps with 61% last week while the share of visits referred to MapQuest was 25%.

The case still remains that MapQuest is a strong brand and is the leading search term driving traffic to the Maps category, but there appears to be some erosion that has taken place over time. The share of traffic from the search term ‘mapquest’ (which represents 32% of the clicks driving traffic to MapQuest) to the Maps category has declined 32% for the 4 weeks ending April 11, 2009 when compared to the same time frame one year ago.

Albeit amidst some controversy following the launch in the UK, the Google Maps feature ‘Street View’ has been very popular and the share of searches on ‘street view’ increased 29% for the 4 weeks ending April 11, 2009 when compared to the same timeframe one year ago. Not surprisingly, Google Maps is the main beneficiary of the searches and received 74% of the traffic from the search term during the same timeframe.

With a tight race between Google Maps and MapQuest, will innovations such as street views be the deciding factor?