Last week, Compete released its ranking of the top 50 Web sites in December 2009. During the final month of the year, winter weather blasted the country and drove holiday travelers into an online tailspin.  In fact, six of the top 20 highest growth Web site categories in December were travel and weather related.  The airport travel category, which includes sites like PHL.org and BWIairport.com, attracted 40 percent more unique visitors (UVs) in December (2.11 million UVs) than the previous month.  News sites related to weather and traffic also experienced tremendous growth, increasing visitors by 34.8 percent over November to reach 52.58 million UVs in aggregate.

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Compete data from the year’s shortest month tells some interesting tales of love, speed, and the pursuit of sandwiches. Perhaps the biggest story, however, comes at the top. For the first time ever, Facebook overtook the top spot in Monthly Attention (time spent as a percentage of total time spent online by U.S. Internet users), commanding nearly 6% of all time spent online by Americans in the month of February. Good news for Facebook, but a tough defeat for dethroned Yahoo!. Looking at the graph below, it appears that Google is next in line to make the pass . . . we’ll keep our eyes on the story in the weeks ahead.

• Flower Power: Clearly, sending flowers on Valentine’s Day is not going out of style any time soon. No shocker that the big flower sites saw a bump in February: ftd.com (5.3 Million visits) led the way, followed by proflowers.com (2.06 Million), 1800flowers.com (1.72 Million), and teleflora.com (942,000).
• The Race is on!: Racing season kicked off with a bang with the Daytona 500 in mid-February. Some new sites rose quickly in the ranks, including pepsifantasyracing.com (955,293 visits), and nhra.net (714,981). Meanwhile, nascar.com visits (14.22 Million) were up 96% month over month.
• Who said there’s no such thing as a free lunch?: After the success of Denny’s Free Grand Slam breakfast day, some other popular eateries followed suit. Quiznos made it rain sandwiches in February on millionsubs.com, resulting in over 2 Million visits to the site. Rival Subway got in on the action at subwayfreshbuzz.com, growing month over month visits by 323% to 1.07 Million, and Jack-in-the-Box piggy-backed its unconventional Super Bowl ad with free drinks, fries, and other tasty offers at hangintherejack.com (1.06 Million visits).

Interested in diving deeper on your own?
All of the data in this post is available with Compete’s Site Analytics and Ranked List tools, so dive headfirst into the data and let us know what else has changed!

Where were you on Black Friday? If you were online, there is a pretty decent chance that you were looking for a sweet deal or two, and where better to find a deal than walmart.com? Well, you weren’t alone. Nearly 7% of all U.S. Internet users on Black Friday visited walmart.com, almost seven times the site’s average reach on any given day in 2008. But what was behind this remarkable spike? Using Compete Pro Analytics, we took a closer look at Walmart’s strategy to identify a few ways in which walmart.com blew away the competition.

Step 1: Using Compete Site Analytics, we ran a Daily Reach report for walmart.com. The graph below highlights our findings: walmart.com’s Black Friday Reach equaled that of amazon.com’s – nearly7% of all people online that day!

Step 2: Next, using Compete Referral Analyics, we drilled down to examine some of the sources of Walmart’s online traffic. One clear alliance that walmart.com forged was with key Black Friday specific sites. As you can see in the data below, walmart.com captured nearly twice the referral traffic share from the top ten Black Friday websites as the next closest competitor.

Step 3: Using Compete Ranked Lists, we ran a report on the top 15,000 Compete ranked sites in November, sorted that list by growth and examined the top ten Black Friday sites. On average, traffic to these sites grew by 1600% over the previous month, confirming that Walmart’s strategy of leveraging Black Friday site traffic lift was a good one.

Step 4: Finally, we honed in on Search data with Compete Search Analytics to see if Walmart’s multichannel media blitz was coupled with Search marketing. Using the Keyword Destination report, we ran a Broad Match for the term “Black Friday”, and sure enough, walmart.com was the top retailer site getting traffic from the keyword.

A carefully crafted and well-executed traffic acquisition strategy resulted in walmart.com kicking off the holiday shopping season with a bang.

August data is now live on Compete.com! August data is now live on Compete.com! See what’s changed for the sites you care with Compete’s Site Analytics and Ranked Lists tools.

One of the more interesting ways to use Compete data is to highlight the shifting web-wide trends in online consumer interest, and August proved to be no exception. With School coming back in session, and the Olympics happening throughout the month, many of the fastest growing sites dealt with sports, books, or dorm rooms. Additional findings:

• Gold medal in online media: NBCOlympics.com, a one-stop-shop for information, stats, and rich media on the 2008 games grew over 40X August. It also captured nearly 50 million visits – making it the 47th US site (by visits) in that month.
• Bye Bye Productivity: With football coming back in season, Fantasy Football is about to become a managerial nightmare again – illustrated nicely by a 203% spike in traffic to myfantasyleague.com.
• Foul weather drives gale force traffic: Interest in hurricanes pushed two sites onto the movers list - NOAAwatch.gov, and myfoxtampabay.com.

Looking at Daily reach – the share of online consumers visiting a site per day over the last month, traffic to NBCOlympics.com is particularly impressive For the entire Beijing games, over 1.2% of all online U.S consumers visited the site on any given day. It’s also interesting to note that the America people appeared to get a bit burned out by the games, shown by the initial spike in reach, a peak surrounding Michael Phelps’ last few swimming events, and then trailing off by 25% shortly after. See the chart below for a daily reach comparison of top moving sites.

Interested in conducting your own analysis?
All of the data in this post is available through Compete’s Ranked Lists and Site Analytics tools. Jump into the data and let us know what else has changed!

July data is now live on Compete.com! What sort of changes did a new month bring? We took a look at the sites that grew the most from June to July to get a better idea of where online traffic is flowing.

Whether it’s the heat of summer, gas prices trapping people at home or something else entirely, several rich media sites saw a huge jump in traffic in July. In fact, of the top 20 fastest moving sites in July, 10 sites’ primary focus is rich media content delivery.

Additional findings include:

• Looking for love in all the free places: Two of the sites making the top movers list – webdate.com and mingle2.com – both offer free online dating services with a “web 2.0″ feel.
• Apple succeeds…even when it fails: Despite “not being up to Apple’s Standards“, it’s new syncing service MobileMe (at me.com) shot up over 700% in July.
• Politics + comedy = Traffic: Jibjab.com released a satirical video highlighting the 2008 election “Time for some campaignin” in July. Traffic, and laughing visitors ensued.
• A traffic surge that no one can celebrate: One of the more concerning trends in July was FDIC.gov making the top movers list, which seems to highlight just how concerned consumers are with the state of the U.S. economy.

Find out how a new month of traffic has impacted your industry in terms of site traffic, the search space, and the overall internet landscape with all of Compete.com’s tools.

On the web, visitor traffic can ebb and flow more than the the Bay of Fundy tides and looking at how this traffic shifts over time provides a great snapshot of what is top-of-mind among consumers at any given point in time.

With the June data we released earlier this week, now is a great time to look reflect on the sites that experienced a tsunami of incoming traffic in our latest month of data. And while sites related to sports seem to dominate the list, other top movers demonstrate consumer interest in Mozilla’s download day, summer blockbusters, celebrity gossip and the U.S energy crisis. The table below shows the top 20 fastest moving sites in June based on total monthly visits.

• Tiger Pounces: With the US Open heading into a sudden death round in the middle of a work day, many tuned in online…much to the dismay of managers coast to coast.
• Fail-Whale makes waves: Plurk.com, a new microblogging site that compete’s with Twitter, may have seen a large boost in traffic due to near constant downtime Twitter experienced in June.
• Firefox rocks: “The home of Firefox Community Marketing”, spreadfirefox.com saw a huge lift in traffic with the release of Firefox 3, and Mozilla’s record breaking “Download day” initiative.

It’s interesting to drill down on whether these surges of visits came from gradually growing interest over the month, or some sort of event driven spike. The chart chart below shows the last 90 daily traffic for several of the sites in the top movers list. This traffic is measured by daily reach: the share of all US internet users who visited each site on a given day.

While applounge.com saw an immediate lift in traffic seems to be related to MySpace applications, large spikes in traffic at spreadfirefox.com and usopen.com surround the two underlying events that drove traffic. While it didn’t peak as high as traffic on usopen.com, Wimbledon.org saw consistent growth leading up to the finals, before a substantial drop in the first week of July.

Shameless pitch: All of this analysis (and more) can be done using Compete Pro metrics. Sign up for an account here.