It’s time to increase your conversion rate.

Screen Capture courtesy Vizion Interactive on Flickr.

Naturally, the first question we must ask ourselves is what conversion rate is. Simply put, conversion rate is a measure of the number of potential customers that go on to buy. In online terms, it is usually the percentage of visitors that make a purchase from your website. The higher your conversion rate, the faster your sales will go up.

Here are a few important techniques you can imply to increase the conversion rate on your website:

1. Aim for simplicity. Make your website easy to navigate and simple to understand. Do not go into complications! A site that is easily accessible to people, attracts a far wider crowd of potential buyers than a non-accessible site.

2. Remember that your objective is the ease of your customer. Make his life as simpler as humanly possible. When a customer decides to buy a thing, give him clear cut instructions as to what to do next. E.g. when a customer has selected something, he would definitely add it to his/her shopping cart. Have clear and easily accessible buttons that state exactly what a customer wants to do and place them somewhere where it can easily be seen by the user.

3. You won’t imagine how many people change their minds about buying a product from a certain website only because that particular website does not provide sufficient information about that product or it’s in some format that is not easily accessible to the user. Anything between 1-99% of your potential sales are lost every day only because of poor usability.

4. Again, I would like to emphasize on the importance of the customer. It is very important to know your customer completely. Where does your customer find you? Howdo they approach you? What keywords they use to access your links? These are few of the very basic things that you must know about your customer. Focus on enhancing those points that attract your customers more.

5. Another helpful tip can be to create a mental (or digital) image of your average customer. Focus on his likes and dislikes. What he looks for on the internet. Which searches does he mostly make? In short, all those things that will help you in understanding the needs and demands of your customer more thoroughly and will help you in getting your conversion rate up.

6. One more thing to keep in mind is that don’t waste the time of your customers. Keep your interaction brief and as thorough as possible in that time. Do not try to bore your customers by asking them things that you don’t really want to know. That annoys your user more than anything and might lose you some potential buyers as well.

When you look at building your site, and drawing traffic to it a funnel will show you what is going on at all levels. When you utilize funnels through Google analytics a basic sign up form on your site for example can be assessed at each level. What this means is if you have a 5 step process, you will be able to see what users reached each step. If you are experiencing a drop off at a specific step you can revamp things.

If we use the above example: Once users have progressed through your website, and you are seeking feedback on how things are working you then access your Google Analytics account. You can analyze what areas you want to focus on. Funnel visualization is one area that many domain owners are focusing on. Once you complete these steps you can opt what level you want Google to analyze for you. Step 1,2,3,4 or 5 of the above example can be determined by checking each level.

Each step should be mandatory, this will allow the funnel to determine what users accessed the entry, where they enter the data and the numbers that completed and accepted or perhaps decided to leave. The drop off rates will indicate an area that you may want to improve or revise. If you are utilizing Google AdWords on your website this process has an excellent platform for monitoring your traffic.

When you are looking at managing your traffic, marketing and advertising it is important that you are aware of what users are surfers, and which are prospects. You want to maximize both and ultimately make them customers. Your funnel can focus on a number of goals. When you first get started you want to track the introduction level, or the sign up level all the way to the thank you page. If you site is selling a product or service then it is important to focus and manage on this numbers. If you have people dropping off before they hit the shopping cart you can focus on why this is happening.

As you can see analyzing your funnels through Google Analytics is an important piece to your website and ultimately your success rate. Utilize them from your landing page, to your sign up page, and lastly your thank you notification.

Once you organize the data that Goggle Analytics provides you can utilize this essential information to market and promote your website. For example, if your product or service is geared towards females and you are attracting a high number of male users you may want to look at changing some of your layout or strategies to attract more women to your site.

You can define the data specifically, and get an idea of what pages are getting the most hits, other site links that users are clicking on to arrive at your site etc. The program can be set up in a basic or advanced format depending on your needs.

Some tips as to what the program will provide and what you will want to be aware of include tracking unique visitors, knowing what your site bounce rate is, outsourced links and how well they are doing, and key wording.

Key wording or phrasing is a big part of web ranking and traffic draw. You need to be aware of the various search requests and have a good number of each on your site. For example if you are running or promoting a sports gambling site you need to ensure you have specific sporting key wording. For example, people may search NFL betting, or NFL odds. If your site is gambling oriented and the majority of data or key wording is about baseball, you could be losing a high number of customers.

Your site bounce rate is a very important aspect. What this means is visitors arrive at your site and exit quickly. This can be caused by a number of things such as bots, and other website crawlers, it can also be caused by people that are being redirected incorrectly or that they are not seeing what the want. The good thing about Google’s program is it has a benchmark for what is normal vs abnormal with regard to say bots vs. human traffic. Bounce rate will let you know of your site is optimized correctly, and also if you have the right content and data for your product or service.

Link or banner sharing is a great way to promote your website and attract visitors to your site. A number of sources will charge you a small fee to host your site link, or banner on their site. These typically are sites that are well established and or are related to your product or service. The last important tip for Google Analytics that we are looking at is with regard to these referring websites. What the data provides you is essential information about who and how often people are using these links. For example lets say you are running an apple pie recipe website and you are paying Granny Smith $250 per month to have your banner or site link provided to people seeking recipes. You run the Google Analytics program and realize that you are only getting 1-2 visitors from that link. You may want to reevaluate if these costs are worthwhile.

As you can see by these few Google Analytics tips this is a very important program for your website. The data it provides is essential if you are looking to run a successful on-line business. One last tip for you and maybe the best one, Google Analytics is a free program.

comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ:SCOR) has released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the U.S. search marketplace. In June 2008, Americans conducted 11.5 billion core searches, representing a 7-percent gain versus May.

In June 2008, Google retained its lead in the U.S. search market capturing 61.5 percent of the searches conducted, down slightly from 61.8 percent in May. Google was followed by Yahoo! Sites (20.9 percent, up from 20.6 percent in May), Microsoft Sites (9.2 percent, up from 8.5 percent in May), Ask Network (4.3 percent), and AOL LLC (4.1 percent).

Here’s the actual report:

  comScore Core Search Report*
  June 2008 vs. May 2008
  Total U.S. - Home/Work/University Locations
  Source: comScore qSearch 2.0

                                            Share of Searches (%)
                                                                   Point
                                                                   Change
                                                                 Jun-08 vs.
  Core Search Entity               May-08          Jun-08          May-08

  Total Core Search                100.0%          100.0%           0.0
  Google Sites                      61.8%           61.5%          -0.3
  Yahoo! Sites                      20.6%           20.9%           0.3
  Microsoft Sites                    8.5%            9.2%           0.7
  Ask Network                        4.5%            4.3%          -0.2
  AOL LLC                            4.5%            4.1%          -0.4

  * Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and
    cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and
    user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five
    search engines are not included in the core search numbers.

According to comScore, Americans conducted 11.5 billion searches at the core search engines, representing a 7-percent increase versus May. Google Sites handled more than 7 billion core searches (up 6 percent from May), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.4 billion (up 9 percent), and Microsoft Sites with more than 1 billion (up 15 percent).

  comScore Core Search Report*
  June 2008 vs. May 2008
  Total U.S. - Home/Work/University Locations
  Source: comScore qSearch 2.0

                                          Search Queries (MM)
                                                                  Percent
                                                                   Change
                                                                 Jun-08 vs.
  Core Search Entity               May-08          Jun-08          May-08

  Total Core Search                10,777          11,541            7%
  Google Sites                      6,664           7,096            6%
  Yahoo! Sites                      2,221           2,416            9%
  Microsoft Sites                     920           1,056           15%
  Ask Network                         486             501            3%
  AOL LLC                             486             471           -3%

  * Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and
    cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and
    user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five
    search engines are not included in the core search numbers.

Here’s more from comScore: “In the comScore June 2008 analysis of the top properties where search activity is observed, Google Sites led with 9.6 billion searches, a 9-percent increase versus May. Yahoo! Sites ranked second with 2.6 billion searches (up 8 percent from May), followed by Microsoft Sites with 1.1 billion (up 14 percent) and AOL LLC with 792 million.”

  comScore Expanded Search Query Report
  June2008 vs. May 2008
  Total U.S. - Home/Work/University Locations
  Source: comScore qSearch 2.0

                                           Search Queries (MM)
                                                                  Percent
                                                                   Change
                                                                 Jun-08 vs.
  Expanded Search Entity           May-08          Jun-08          May-08

  Total Expanded Search            15,463          16,668            8%
  Google Sites                      8,838           9,601            9%
    Google                          6,814           7,277            7%
    YouTube/All Other               2,024           2,324           15%
  Yahoo! Sites                      2,387           2,570            8%
    Yahoo!                          2,352           2,530            8%
    All Other                          35              40           14%
  Microsoft Sites                     963           1,102           14%
    MSN-Windows Live                  932           1,069           15%
    Microsoft/All Other                31              33            6%
  AOL LLC                             831             792           -5%
    AOL Search Network                456             430           -6%
    MapQuest/All Other                375             362           -3%
  Ask Network                         489             506            3%
    Ask.com                           321             341            6%
    MyWebSearch.com/ All Other        168             165           -2%
  Fox Interactive Media               402             457           14%
    MySpace                           395             448           13%
    All Other                           7               9           29%
  eBay                                449             444           -1%
  Craigslist.org                      314             342            9%
  Facebook.com                        121             157           30%
  Amazon Sites                        141             152            8%

In comparison, it’s interesting to note what 10e20 reported a year ago about the 2006 holiday spending:

What does this mean? There is increased consumer trust in online marketplaces, and as more and more consumers continue to value the convenience of online shopping, more and more consumers will buy. 2007 will likely see a greater increase too.

Apparently Tamar was right last year; 2007 was a good year for online sales. December 10th, 2007 was seen as “Green Monday” and will continue to reign as the heaviest online spending day of the 2007 Holiday season.

comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ:SCOR) has released their update of theholiday season e-commerce/online spending for the first 51 days of the 2007 season, which was November 1 to December 21st, 2007. Apparently more than $26 billion has been spent online during the season, which marks a nineteen percent gain versus the same days last year.

  2007 Holiday Season To Date vs. Corresponding Days* in 2006
  Non-Travel (Retail) Spending
  Excludes Auctions and Large Corporate Purchases
  Total U.S. - Home/Work/University Locations
  Source: comScore, Inc.

                                               Billions ($)
                                                                      Pct
  Holiday Season to Date                    2006         2007        Change

  November 1 - December 21                $22.04       $26.29          19%
  Thanksgiving Day (November 22)           $0.21        $0.27          29%
  "Black Friday" (November 23)             $0.43        $0.53          22%
  "Cyber Monday" (November 26)             $0.61        $0.73          21%
  "Green Monday" (December 10)             $0.66        $0.88          33%

  * Corresponding Shopping Days, Not Calendar Days

comScore is continuing to seen online spending strength as the holiday season comes to a close. The most recent five-day span ending 12/21/2007 had a 25 percent growth rate versus the same period last year. They said, in a report just out, that the heaviest online shopping days are behind us now, but some online retailers allowed deliveries before Christmas for orders to be placed by December 22nd, with an in-store pickup available for orders placed by Christmas Eve.

Green Monday, reported as being Monday, December 10, 2007, will be the heaviest individual spending day of the season with $881 million in sales. Cyber Monday, Monday, November 26, which represents the first major spike in online spending activity during the season, ranked as the 9th heaviest day with $733 million in sales.

  Top 10 Online Spending Days of 2007 Holiday Season
  Non-Travel (Retail) Spending
  Excludes Auctions and Large Corporate Purchases
  Total U.S. - Home/Work/University Locations
  Source: comScore, Inc.

                                                     Dollars Spent
  Day                                                ($ Millions)

  Monday, December 10
  ("Green Monday")                                       $881
  Tuesday, December 11                                   $819
  Thursday, December 6                                   $803
  Wednesday, December 5                                  $798
  Tuesday, December 4                                    $776
  Wednesday, December 12                                 $754
  Monday, December 3                                     $753
  Friday, December 7                                     $734
  Monday, November 26
  ("Cyber Monday")                                       $733
  Thursday, November 29                                  $733

  comScore 2007 Retail E-Commerce Forecast

  Online Non-Travel (Retail) Holiday Consumer Spending
  Excludes Auctions and Large Corporate Purchases
  Total U.S. - Home/Work/University Locations
  Source: comScore, Inc.

                                           Billions ($)
                                                                 Pct
                                        2006          2007      Change

  January - October                     $77.5        $93.6        21%
  Holiday Season (Nov-Dec)              $24.6        $29.5*       20%*

  *comScore forecast

comScore November 2007 Search Engine Rankings
In other comScore news, comScore has released the November 2007 search engine rankings. This is the monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the search marketplace on the internet.

In November 2007, Google Sites share of core searches stood at 58.6 percent, virtually the same level as in October. Yahoo! Sites ranked second with 22.4 percent, followed by Microsoft Sites (9.8 percent), Ask Network (4.6 percent) and Time Warner Network (4.5 percent), which had the largest share point gain during the month (up 0.3 points).

  comScore Core Search Report*
  November 2007
  Total U.S. - Home/Work/University Locations
  Source: comScore qSearch 2.0
                                            Share of Searches (%)
                                                                   Point
                                                                   Change
                                                                 Novt-07 vs.
  Core Search Entity                 Oct-07           Nov-07       Oct-07
  Total Core Search                  100.0%           100.0%         0.0
  Google Sites                        58.4%            58.6%         0.2
  Yahoo! Sites                        22.8%            22.4%        -0.4
  Microsoft Sites                      9.8%             9.8%         0.0
  Ask Network                          4.7%             4.6%        -0.1
  Time Warner Network                  4.2%             4.5%         0.3

  * Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and
    cross-channel searches.  Searches for mapping, local directory, and
    user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five
    search engines are not included in the core search numbers.

Total, us Americans conducted 10 billion searches at the core (main) search engines, representing a 5-percent decline versus October. With one less day in the month, November can be a seasonally softer month for search activity. Nearly 5.9 billion core searches were conducted at Google Sites during the month, while Yahoo! Sites recorded 2.2 billion.

  comScore Core Search Report*
  November 2007
  Total U.S. - Home/Work/University Locations
  Source: comScore qSearch 2.0
                                          Search Queries (MM)
                                                                  Percent
                                                                   Change
                                                                 Novt-07 vs.
  Core Search Entity                 Oct-07           Nov-07       Oct-07
  Total Core Search                  10,527           10,030       -4.7%
  Google Sites                        6,151            5,882       -4.4%
  Yahoo! Sites                        2,405            2,249       -6.5%
  Microsoft Sites                     1,036              984       -5.1%
  Ask Network                           491              463       -5.8%
  Time Warner Network                   443              453        2.4%

  * Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and
    cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and
    user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five
    search engines are not included in the core search numbers.

In the November 2007 analysis of the Top 50 properties worldwide where search activity is observed, Google Sites led the pack with 7.3 billion searches. Yahoo! Sites ranked second with 2.4 billion searches, followed by Microsoft Sites (984 million), and Time Warner Network (838 million). As a result of search activity likely related to holiday shopping, eBay and Amazon Sites both experienced an increase for the month with 489 million and 178 million queries, respectively.

  comScore Expanded Search Query Report
  November 2007
  Total U.S. - Home/Work/University Locations
  Source: comScore qSearch 2.0
                                             Search Queries (MM)
                                                                  Percent
                                                                   Change
                                                                Novt-07 vs.
  Expanded Search Entity                Oct-07        Nov-07       Oct-07
  Total Expanded Search                 14,471        13,907       -3.9%
  Google Sites                           7,468         7,326       -1.9%
       Google                            6,184         5,923       -4.2%
       YouTube/All Other                 1,284         1,403        9.3%
  Yahoo! Sites                           2,577         2,395       -7.0%
       Yahoo!                            2,538         2,358       -7.1%
       All Other                            39            37       -5.1%
  Microsoft Sites                        1,058           984       -7.0%
       MSN-Windows Live                  1,021           947       -7.2%
       Microsoft/All Other                  37            37        0.0%
  Time Warner Network                      905           838       -7.4%
       AOL                                 433           445        2.6%
       Mapquest/All Other                  472           393      -16.7%
  eBay                                     472           489        3.5%
  Ask Network                              493           464       -6.0%
       Ask.com                             277           263       -5.1%
       MyWebSearch.com/ All Other          216           201       -6.9%
  Fox Interactive Media                    483           436       -9.8%
       MySpace                             475           427      -10.0%
       All Other                             8             9       12.5%
  Craigslist.org                           214           207       -3.3%
  Amazon Sites                             146           178       22.0%
  Facebook.com                             152           119      -21.7%

comScore has unveiled a new service for marketers called “comScore Marketer” that gives you a comprehensive set of online tools that allows you to assess a site’s online marketing performance. comScore Marketer is a new interactive search intelligence service that helps you benchmark performance and optimize a marketing campaign’s ROI.

comScore Marketer allows you to benchmark a campaign’s performance versus competitors–and optimize the ROI of your search marketing efforts.

The comScore Marketer service give you granular information about searchers (visitors who used search to come to a site) as well as the search phrases–this gives you intelligence that you can act upon.

– Create more efficient and cost-effective campaigns using paid and organic search terms.

– Identify high performing search terms at a site and category level.

– Analyze searchers and the use of search terms by demographic segment.

– Discover high-potential consumer segments and pinpoint the optimal search sites and search terms to reach them.

– Find out who is competing on search terms to identify prime affiliate marketing partners.

– Maximize the ROI of search and online marketing investments.

Sample Data

Through the comScore Marketer service you can see data like the percentage of total clicks via Paid search versus the percentage of total clicks via Organic or “natural” search. Here’s some sample data from the comScore Marketer service that shows information about the search phrase “credit card” or “credit cards” (detailed below):

Click-Thru Report for
Search Terms "Credit Card" or "Credit Cards"

June 2007
Source: comScore Marketer

Click-Thru                   Share of Total                 Organic
Destination Site             Click-Thrus       Paid        (Algorithmic)
                                for          Percentage    Percentage of
Search Terms of Total Clicks Search Terms   of Total Clicks Total Clicks

  Total Click-Thrus            6.8 MM        1.6 MM         5.2 MM
  Total (%)                  100.0          23.7           76.3
  CreditCards.com             10.6          67.0           33.0
  JP Morgan Chase Property     8.1          22.7           77.3
  HSBC                         6.1          38.1           61.9
  Capital One                  4.1          49.4           50.6
  Citigroup                    3.1          11.6           88.4
  Bank of America              3.1           7.4           92.6
  Bankrate.com Sites           2.8          10.5           89.5
  American Express             2.3          42.4           57.6

The results shown above show that creditcards.com is the top destination for clicks for “credit card” or “credit cards”. This accounts for 10.6 percent of all click-thrus, followed by the JP Morgan Chase Property (8.1 percent) and HSBC (6.1 percent).

That fact that CreditCards.com is the top destination is because of its heavy PPC strategy, as two-thirds (67.0 percent) of clicks to the site come from PPC. However, the JP Morgan Chase Property and HSBC each generated at least 6 percent of total click-thrus on the search terms “credit card and “credit cards”, but they have a significantly lower share of the total number of clicks resulting from PPC (22.7 percent and 38.1 percent). In other words, these sites are relatively more effective than CreditCards.com at generating “credit card”-related clicks via organic search results.

For more info about comScore Marketer, go here.

Offermatica is a provider of media delivery, testing, and optimization software. WebTrends is a provider of web analytics and Marketing Performance Management solutions. This new technology partnership enables customers who have both companies’ products to improve their online visitors’ experiences and customer profitability.

This new dynamic combination of Offermatica with WebTrends Marketing Labâ„¢ solutions offers you customizable marketing analytics. This allows you to evaluate your web site and marketing efforts, and gives you the ability to quickly and easily deliver relevant, targeted content to your site’s visitors–you can also leverage rich customer-centric information from WebTrends.

In addition, this new Offermatica/WebTrends partnership makes Offermatica test results automatically available for analysis within WebTrends solutions. The result is a quick, automated, and precise approach to deliver relevant online visitor experiences that positively impact customer acquisition, retention and lifetime value.

Offermatica’s dynamic profiling technologies allows you to specify visitor and customer behaviors that can serve as the basis for the delivery of personalized content. Enabled by the Offermatica Open API layer and WebTrends Visitor 360 web services, the Offermatica-WebTrends integrated solution allows you to quickly and seamlessly deliver unique visitor experiences leveraging deep behavioral insight and sophisticated customer segmentation and targeting capabilities of WebTrends Marketing Lab.

With this new solution, not only is there a streamlined user experience, the collaboration between Coremetrics and IBM provides embedded analysis and measurement capabilities, with in-depth, customizable tagging for reporting purposes. Retailers can now track the effectiveness of the Web 2.0 Store, helping them understand such items as AJAX pop-ups.

In an online retail environment, the technology in the IBM Web 2.0 Store enables online customers to add a purchase to their cart, continue to browse the site and view other product recommendations via AJAX pop-ups, without losing their place in the checkout process. This interim browsing activity can now be measured by joint Coremetrics/IBM WebSphere Commerce customers, as part of the overall campaign analysis.

WebSphere Web 2.0 recent enhancements:

Customer empowerment
– WebSphere Commerce Web 2.0 store solution
– Enhanced search and navigation
– WebSphere Commerce integration with sitemaps
– Enhanced search and navigation by integrating to IBM WebSphere Content Discovery Server

Enhanced Webanalytics
– Coremetrics for IBM WebSphere Commerce auto tagging utility
– Coremetrics Tag Library support for WebSphere Commerce versions, 5.6 and 5.6.1
– Coremetrics reports for WebSphere Commerce

Web content management
– WebSphere Commerce and content management system integration
– IBM Workplace Web Content Management on WebSphere Portal 6.0 for WebSphere Commerce v6.0

Foundational leadership
– Front-office integration
– WebSphere Commerce Services for catalog, order, member and contract
– WebSphere Commerce Portal integration

– Back-office integration
– Web services support for back-office integration
– WebSphere Commerce and SAP system integration
– WebSphere Commerce and Sterling Customer Order Management PCA (Sterling COM PCA)integration

– Paymentech Plug-in for WebSphere Commerce

Coremetrics and IBM have also recently announced a ‘plug and play’ solution for multichannel web analytics, based on Coremetrics’ existing deep integration with the IBM WebSphere Commerce platform. This new solution adds a set of reports, analytics, and adapters that provide a streamlined, measurement platform for the performance of sales, products, promotions and B2B contracts across the internet and the call center.

Coremetrics is a leading provider of on-demand web analytics and precision marketing solutions.

Coremetrics offers the industry’s only web analytics platform that captures and stores all customer and visitor clickstream activity to build LIVE (Lifetime Individual Visitor Experience) Profiles. Representing the single most accurate and comprehensive source of online customer data, LIVE Profiles serve as the foundation for all successful digital marketing initiatives. Coremetrics services more than 1000 brands and has delivered over $300 million in documented ROI in the past two years.

Coremetrics is the integrated web analytics solution for IBM WebSphere Commerce, delivering a best-of-breed multichannel business analytics solution. To learn more about Coremetrics, visit www.coremetrics.com or call 877-721-CORE.

comScore has reported that Google maintained its place as the most-visited site in the United Kingdom with 27.3 million UK visitors. Microsoft webites and eBay followed, with 26.8 and 22 million visitors, respectively.

The biggest gainer within the top 20 sites was British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB). Their website had a 36 percent increase, up to to 9.7 million UK visitors during March 2007. Apparently the increase in traffic is attributed to a major advertising campaign aimed at promoting BSkyB’s entertainment and communication packages. They’re in the midst of increasing competition for new customers from Virgin Group. Virgin websites attracted 11.1 million visitors in March 2007, which is up 4 percent from February, 2007.

Several social networking Web 2.0 websites showed gains in March 2007, including Tagged.com. Tagged became the UK’s biggest gainer with a 226 percent increase–they had more than 3 million visitors during the period. In addition, Facebook.com was up 38 percent to 2.7 million visitors, and Six Apart websites went up 30 percent to 3.5 million visitors during March 2007. Bebo.com grew 9 percent to 7.8 million visitors. Bebo.com is the only one of these websites to be represented in the top 20 list.

The UK Top Gaining Properties list was dominated by many major consumer websites, including:
- Vodafone, up 47 percent to 4 million visitors during March 2007
- British Airways, up 43 percent to 4.4 million visitors during March 2007
- Ticketmaster, up 36 percent to 3.7 million visitors during March 2007
- Wal-Mart, up 15 percent to 2.6 million visitors during March 2007
- Sony Online, up 14 percent to 3.7 million visitors during March 2007
- Tesco Stores, up 10 percent to 7 million visitors during March 2007
- Marks & Spencer, up 10 percent to 2.7 million visitors during March 2007
- The easyGROUP, up 9 percent to 3.3 million visitors during March 2007

The Hitwise U.S. Top 10 Awards ranks the most successful U.S. websites in 160+ online industries. Hitwise reports on the anonymous online usage and search behavior of more than 10 million U.S. Internet users.

USA TODAY is the United States’ best-selling newspaper and will celebrate its twenty fifth anniversary on September 15, 2007. USA Today is published via satellite at 36 locations in the USA and at four sites abroad. With a total average daily circulation of 2.3 million, USA TODAY is available worldwide. USA TODAY is published by Gannett Co., Inc. (NYSE:GCI) . The USA TODAY brand also includes: USATODAY.com, an award-winning news and information Web site that is updated 24 hours per day; USA TODAY Sports Weekly, a magazine for enthusiasts of professional football and baseball; and USA TODAY LIVE, the television arm of the USA TODAY brand that brings the spirit and quality of the newspaper to television.

Hitwise Awards 192.com Top 3 Business Directory

In another category, 192.com placed in the top 3 Hitwise UK Business Directories category. 192.com is the de facto standard search engine for finding people, business and places in the UK. Established in 1997 by Alastair Crawford, founder of UK-Info Disk and Passado.com, the multi-award winning 192.com has over five million registered users accessing unequalled breath and depth of data.

192.com searches over 600 million records including free directory enquiries (http://www.192.com/search/people.cfm), local business listings (http://www.192.com/search/business.cfm), interactive mapping, aerial photography and property reports. Premium records include current and historical electoral rolls; the birth, deaths and marriages register; 1861 census data; and company and director reports.

192.com Business Services, the corporate arm of 192.com, delivers online identity verification and tracing solutions to over one million desktops across retail, gaming, finance and the public sector.

EasyJet.com Wins Top award for Commercial Airlines and Travel-Transport

According to TravelConnect, EasyJet.com, Europe’s leading airline website, is the UK’s favorite travel website. easyJet won the Number One award for Commercial Airlines and Travel-Transport.

About Hitwise
Hitwise is the leading online competitive intelligence service. Only Hitwise provides its 1,200 global clients with daily insights on how their customers interact with a broad range of competitive websites, and how their competitors use different tactics to attract online customers.

Since 1997, Hitwise has pioneered a unique, network-based approach to Internet measurement. Through relationships with ISPs around the world, Hitwise’s patented methodology anonymously captures the online usage, search, and conversion behaviour of 25 million Internet users. This unprecedented volume of Internet usage data is seamlessly integrated into the easy to use, web-based service, designed to help marketers better plan, implement, and report on a range of online marketing programs.