Lots of news from the UK this week! It’s smart to pay attention to both sides of the Atlantic, and research from Hitwise seems to indicate that online retailers in the UK are now getting lesser amounts of traffic from paid search efforts.
However, their overall numbers are still good, so where is the extra traffic coming from? Social networks. While paid search traffic has fallen over the last year, search engines are still the primary source of traffic for nearly all online retailers, in and out of the UK. However, paid listings seem to be having less effect:
However, sites categorized under Hitwise’s Shopping and Classifies section get more traffic than ever from social networking sites; numbers have increased from 5.2% in March ’08 to 7.1% in March ’09. Social networks are bringing in 58% more traffic than webmail providers like Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo Mail, meaning that they are more effective than email campaigns as well.
A recent study on that showed that only 13% of email marketers currently integrate social media into their campaigns; but 46% of them intend to do so this year.
Tags: email, paid search, social marketing, UK