Search, travel and career sites see more visitors

The latest research from Nielsen//Netratings indicates that more visitors are visiting search, travel and career websites. In fact, visitors are returning many times to their favorite sites.

by Kristina Knight

For search providers an average of 71% of users who visited a search engine in June also visited the same engine in July. Google leads the pack with a 79% retention rate, followed by Yahoo (69% retention) and MSN/Windows Live Search (65% retention). This does not mean that users are only visiting one search engine, however. The study found that users often use more than one search engine when performing a search.

Career development websites are also leading in retention of users. CareerBuilder, Monster and Yahoo HotJobs are the leading career sites in the US and showed a 38% retention rate for users logging on from home and a 44% retention rate for users logging on at work. Like search, users are not loyal to a single career network, though, and log on to several different job sites from month to month.

In the travel category, about 31% of users who visited in June also visited a travel site in July. Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity are the three biggest travel sites in the US according to the report. As with both career and search sites, users aren't exclusively loyal and prefer to compare results from all three different sites.

What this means for online marketers is that putting all the eggs (ad dollars) in a single basket (Google for search, Monster for careers or Expedia for travel) is a mistake. Instead, take a wider approach and pepper the ad dollars throughout all of the biggest sites for the best results.