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Which industries are getting the most traffic from search
Fri, 18 Jan 2008 10:52:25 by Matt Hopkins

Recently, Advertising Age released their Search Marketing Fact Pack for 2007.  This is a great document to download and keep by your computer for casual reference as it is jam-packed with little factoids.

One of the sections provides the top industry categories that are getting the most traffic from search.  At first, I was pretty surprised by the results and so conducted a straw poll around theVL office to find that we were all were guessing similar industries - travel, news, sports, etc.  But we were all wrong.

Here's the top 10 industry categories who are getting the highest percentage of their traffic (visits) from search engines:

Rank Industry Percent of Traffic from Search Engines
1 Education 44.64%
2 Health and medical 44.43%
3 Food and beverage 39.74%
4 Music 39.16%
5 Community 34.73%
6 Travel 32.51%
7 Government 31.78%
8 Shopping and classifieds 25.55%
9 Aviation 24.85%
10 Automotive 23.75%

So we were way off. 

I never would have guessed Education or Health and medical...  perhaps its because these industries spend less on other forms of advertising as ways of driving traffic to their site (compared with Travel, Shopping etc).    Amazingly - Sports came bottom of the list with only 9.84% of their traffic coming from search engines.

Either way its some intriguing statistics and highlights the need/opportunity for some industries to place more effort into search marketing.

Matt Hopkins
Managing Director


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