We recently launched Hitwise Canada and in my first post using our Canadian data, I wanted to take a high level view of what my fellow Canadians are doing online and how that compares to their US and UK counterparts. The largest category in Canada, based on share of Internet visits is Search Engines. Hitwise categorises websites into over 165 industry categories.Search Engines came out on top, capturing 14.58% of Canadian Internet visits in April, followed by Social Networking and Forums and Entertainment.
The following chart shows the share of visits going to the 15 most popular parent categories.

(NB – I have used parent categories except for Computers and Internet, where I have used the sub-categories Search Engines, Social Networking, Portal Frontpages and Forums and Email Services.)
Search Engines attract a much larger share of visits in Canada than in the US or UK. Search Engines account for a 53% larger share of Canadian internet visits compared to the US and 22% larger than the UK. Social Networks, Entertainment (in particular YouTube) and web based email are also much more popular (as measured by share of Internet visits) in Canada than in the UK and US. Conversely, Adult and Shopping and Classifieds attract a much smaller share of visits in Canada than in either the UK or US.
The following table lists the top 5 categories for each of these markets. Notice that Adult and Shopping and Classifieds don’t appear among the top 5 categories in Canada. Adult comes in at #6 and Shopping and Classifieds at #8 based on share of Canadian internet visits in April.

Search Engines Account for One Third of Upstream Visits
Search Engines are the largest category in terms of visits and unsurprisingly are also the largest source of upstream visits to websites in Canada. In April, 33% of visits to All Categories of websites came directly from a search engine. Social Networks and Entertainment websites were the second and third largest sources of traffic, accounting for 11% and 10% of upstream visits respectively.