Holiday Traffic To Retail Web Sites Grew 17%Holiday Traffic To Retail Web Sites Grew 17%

Traffic to retail Web sites grew 17% in the 2007 holiday season compared to the previous year, according to a recent report.

The Hitwise U.S. Holiday 2007 Recap Report found that visits increased from Thanksgiving to Christmas, and traffic peaked on Thanksgiving Day. Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, was the second busiest day, according to the report.

Retail Web site traffic grew by 20% on Thanksgiving Day and 16% on Black Friday, compared to 2006.

"Each year the holiday shopping season represents an important customer acquisition opportunity for the majority of retailers, both online and off," Heather Dougherty, research director of Hitwise, said in a statement.

"The double-digit growth rates in online traffic during the holidays have continued to garner significant attention from retailers, driving marketing dollars to the channel. Competitive intelligence becomes increasingly important during this critical period to understand what strategies have worked in the past."

On Thanksgiving, brick and mortar stores led the way for online traffic, with Wal-Mart in the top slot and BestBuy and Circuit City close behind. On Black Friday, Wal-Mart maintained its position but Amazon.com and BestBuy rounded out the top three.

"Heavy promotional activity from retailers successfully increased traffic on Cyber Monday," Dougherty said in the report, adding that traffic increased by 26% on that day compared to the same day in 2006. That made Cyber Monday, the Monday following Thanksgiving, the third busiest day.

Search engines and cross-retail accounted for 57% of the traffic to the retail sites monitored by Hitwise. Google accounted for 18%, while Yahoo Search accounted for 6%, according to the report. E-mail drove about 10% of the traffic, while social networking sites and forums sent 4% of the retail traffic upstream. Of that, MySpace sent 2% of the visits to retail sites.