For the past seven years, visitors to Borders.com have been automatically redirected to Border’s hosted site on Amazon.com. While hitching a ride on Amazon’s phenomenal growth at one time was likely a sound business decision, in hind sight that short-term fix to Border’s ecommerce woes handicapped Border’s online growth and its brand in general. The Border’s store on Amazon.com lacked its own identity and gave shoppers little incentive to continue shopping via Borders.com on subsequent visits. Not surprisingly, over the past five years, Borders.com traffic has remained virtually unchanged at around 250,000 unique visitors per month.

This past May that all changed when Borders.com re-launched its own website, and took back the reins to its online destiny. Toys R Us, it’s worth noting, made a similar decision two years ago, and since that time the toy retailer has successfully reclaimed its category leadership.

Not content to just launch a pretty website, Border’s did their homework and has created a site that offers book lovers an innovative experience that brings more of the joy of visiting a bookstore to the online world. One feature, the “magic shelf” seeks to more closely mimic the experience of browsing through bookshelves and discovering new titles.

Before re-launching the site, Borders.com traffic was half that of lesser-known bookstores BooksAMillion.com and Powells.com. Borders.com trailed its primary brick-and-mortar rival, BarnesAndNoble.com by a far greater margin. However, once the new Borders.com went live, there was instantly a spike in traffic that saw them vault past their smaller rivals and into contention with BarnesAndNoble.com.

Borders has been putting forth a strong effort to increase the traffic and sales on its new site. In July, Borders.com ran a campaign inviting its visitors to enter in a chance to win a $1,000 gift card by watching a short video that highlighted various features of the new Borders.com. Everyone who entered received something for their effort, such as discounts on purchases made on the site. This campaign was successful in increasing sales and creating more engagement on the site, as visitors who entered in the sweepstakes spent much more time on the site and were more likely to place an order.

Since its launch, Borders.com has seen its share of visitors placing an order steadily increase each month. In July, Borders.com converted 5.0% of visitors, which puts them in-line with BarnesAndNoble.com’s 5.9% conversion rate. Borders has attracted many new visitors to its site and the new traffic is purchasing online with increasing frequency.

Parting ways with Amazon.com already seems to be paying great dividends for Borders. After only a couple of months, the world’s second largest bookstore chain now has the online presence to match its offline magnitude.

I’m on the lookout for some good deals on electronics. Being the strict online research person I am, I started with the first two sites that came to mind: Best Buy and Circuit City. As I did my research, I wondered how the online presence of these two retailers stacked up, especially as we get into the back-to-school marketing campaigns and head into the all-important holiday shopping season.

And I found some surprising things. Since May, Circuit City’s website has drawn in more people than Best Buy’s, but at the same time their conversion rates have fallen.

In July, for the first time since October 2002, CircuitCity.com saw more visitors than BestBuy.com.

• For months, Circuit City’s traffic (in red) was consistently lower than Best Buy’s (in yellow)
• Starting in May 2008, Circuit City traffic began to climb, eventually surpassing Best Buy’s

Not only is Circuit City bringing more people to their site, but they are coming back more often.

• Since May, the average person visiting Circuit City has had almost one additional session on the site
• The upward trend in sessions per person at Circuit City marks a dramatic increase when we look at Circuit City’s position relative to Best Buy

Recent reports I’ve seen in the press indicate that Circuit City has been falling behind Best Buy, but they have clearly drawn a lot of people to their site, and often. Could these be indicators that Circuit City’s fortunes are changing?

The increase in volume of customers and the number of repeat sessions might be good signs, but Circuit City’s site still has one problem: their conversion rates are beginning to drop.

The lower conversion rate is likely due in part to the recent increase in traffic on circuitcity.com – more people and more sessions means a bigger denominator. If you look at conversion as a percentage of all sessions, Circuit City has converted an average of 1.5% over the last 2 years, Best Buy an average of 1.3%. But since May when the upward trend in traffic and sessions began, Circuit City’s conversion rate fell from 1.9% to 1.1% in June and 0.5% in July.

As we can see in the chart below:

• In June and July 2008, Best Buy’s conversion rate began to exceed Circuit City’s, just as the latter’s traffic and sessions began to increase
• Circuit City has historically outperformed Best Buy in converting browsers to buyers as a percentage of their overall sessions

But not only the conversion rate has dropped – despite the increase in traffic, Circuit City’s total number of conversions is still significantly lower than Best Buy’s. As we can see in the chart below, Best Buy tends to convert more sessions in absolute terms each month either matching or exceeding Circuit City since November 2006. So Circuit City’s recent increase in web traffic isn’t generating more online customers for them.

So, the bad news here for Circuit City is that although it’s attracting people to its site more often, it’s actually converting a smaller percentage of them into online customers, and still significantly fewer overall than Best Buy.

In a few weeks, we’ll get a fuller picture of how these two retailers fare for the full back-to-school shopping season both in their bricks and mortar and online stores. Will Best Buy widen its lead, or will Circuit City turn more of those new browsers into buyers? And what will that mean for the high-stakes fourth quarter?

As the end of summer approaches and July turns to August, many families are overcome by grief and relief: the former from students, that the first homeroom is near, and the latter from parents, for the same reason. With every advertisement baiting families with the “best” Back-to-School sales of the season, three major office supply retailers prepare to battle for the buck in the online channel.

A baseline check ranks Staples as the clear frontrunner, both by improving 32% on average in monthly visitors last year and by maintaining a strong lead overall across sessions and time. In the same period, Office Depot stays competitive while OfficeMax declines. Quality often outweighs quantity, however, and Office Depot culls a valuable shopper set by measure of time spent. Using length of visit as a proxy for user interest, Office Depot more than doubles its lead over the market average from last year in time spent per visit, lasting a full two minutes longer than Staples’ average.

Conversely, over last year Office Depot scaled down its bounce population against Staples (users who jump onto a site and quickly “bounce” off within 20 seconds; websites aim to minimize this traffic). Though OfficeMax consistently scored the lowest bounce share, Office Depot’s combined low bounce rate and high visit length imply its strength in effectively engaging users online.

The catch here is that time isn’t always money. While Office Depot grooms its audience well, Staples still carries a higher percentage of consumers through to purchase. Last month, Office Depot converted 4% of its visitors, but Staples enjoyed twice that conversion rate; OfficeMax, half as much. It would be a quick judgment to conclude that some site inefficiency (e.g. complicated navigation to product or purchase leading to longer sessions) pushes the market from Office Depot toward Staples’ shorter visits, resulting in more conversions. If this were true, we would see a shrink in visitors to Office Depot year-over-year, which is not the case. More likely, it is a question of price.

And to parents, price is the great driver of purchase. Heading into the new school year rush, all three of these retailers stand ready to compete for the greatest share of wallet. With an expanded internet shopper base this year, expect more and more of these purchases to be online at home rather than on line at the checkout counter.

eBay has grown over the years to become a major center for online purchasing. In March 2008, over 75 million Americans visited eBay. Two thirds of these visitors performed a search on the site. This begs the question, what was being searched for?

Below is a table with the top 10 out of the 30 most searched terms on eBay in March 2008. The “Share” for each term is determined by dividing the searches made on a given term by the total number of searches made on the site.

Video games, electronics, handbags, and clothing dominate the list. Nintendo Wii, which seems to sell out before it can even reach a store’s shelf, is the most searched term by an enormous margin. Apple products and designer fashion are also quite frequently searched.

Click here to see the entire list of the Top 30 eBay Searches located on Compete’s Data Hub, which you can check out often for updates.

This is the time of year that visions of sugarplums turn to scary thoughts about waistlines. My gym is currently overflowing with loud (and sweaty) people hoping to be among the “biggest losers” in the contest of the month.

For the past decade, the SUBWAY® restaurant chain has tried to stand out in the crowded fast-food market by striking a low-fat eating chord with consumers. SUBWAY, is celebrating “10 years of keeping it off” featuring spokesman Jared Fogle, who lost more than 200 pounds and his “fat pants” by exercising and eating at SUBWAY. On the 10th anniversary of the campaign and the new “Tour de Pants”, I wonder: has SUBWAY’s message resonated with consumers?

In January, traffic to Subway.com jumped to more than 500,000 unique visitors, making it one of the top 3,500 sites on the Internet. People are clearly interested in the restaurant. One glance at Compete’s Search Analytics data shows that some of Subway’s online visitors are interested in the nutritional information of the SUBWAY menu.

• “Subway nutrition” drives 2% of search referrals to subway.com.
• In contrast, the top 5 searches for Taco Bell and Quiznos have nothing to do with nutrition.
• Nutritional searches aren’t uncommon among rival fast-food sites. The keyword “McDonald’s nutrition” drives 3% of search referrals to McDonalds.com. “Wendys nutrition” also drives 2.8% of search referrals to Wendys.com, although it isn’t a top-5 keyword.

People are interested in the nutritional information of SUBWAY food. But that finding by itself isn’t a clear signal that SUBWAY’s marketing approach is resonating. Does SUBWAY attract people interested in diet and fitness in general? Better than fast-food chain rivals?

Compete data shows that approximately one out of 10 online consumers is a diet, beauty and fitness enthusiast, visiting sites like Weightwatchers and BallyFitness.

• These diet/beauty/nutrition enthusiasts were three times more likely to visit SUBWAY.com in January than the average online consumer.
• They are five times more likely to visit Subwayfreshbuzz.com. Visitors to this SUBWAY site can enter to be in a commercial with Jared, play the “Pants Dance,” and submit their own weight loss stories.
• SUBWAY’s “fresh buzz” site tops more than 25 fast-food rivals in attracting this desired segment.

SUBWAY is a national sponsor of the American Heart Association’s Heart Walks and is helping to promote the non-profit Jared Foundation online. Thanks, Jared and SUBWAY, for reminding us to make healthy lifestyle choices. It’s an important message that doesn’t seem to be falling on deaf ears.

A couple months back I wrote about how McDonalds’ Monopoly game was driving significant traffic to McDonalds’ corporate site and creating great exposure for the McDonalds brand. As a result I have been deemed Compete’s guru of fast food online traffic. Web traffic during the month of December tells another interesting story. In December, Burger King launched an ad campaign known as “Whopper Freak Out” in which they told patrons at a Las Vegas restaurant location that they had discontinued their token menu item, the Whopper. Video of these exchanges became part of a major television ad campaign that showed customers becoming extremely upset or freaking out. To host these videos Burger King created a sister site, whopperfreakout.com.

BurgerKing.com has had pretty steady traffic of over the last few years without a great deal of month to month change. Like McDonald’s promotion/campaign, Burger King’s was successful at generating additional brand exposure and awareness. In December 2007, traffic to burgerking.com and whopperfreakout.com was nearly identical (therefore the sister site doubled Burger King’s online brand exposure). However, unlike the Monopoly game, whopperfreakout.com did not drive much traffic to the corporate site. Only 14,891 people visited both sites in December (only about 8% of burgerking.com’s total traffic).

In addition to brand exposure in the form of traffic, whopperfreakout.com was able to generate exposure by holding the attention of its visitors. The average stay at whopperfreakout.com in December was nearly 5 minutes, more than double that of burgerking.com, and as a result produced more attention for the Burger King brand.

But how does Burger King perform compared to its biggest competitors McDonalds and Wendy’s? Not very well. Traffic to mcdonalds.com is consistently more than double that of Burger King and Wendy’s traffic is consistently greater as well. In fact, traffic to wendys.com in December was greater than the combined traffic of burgerking.com and whopperfreakout.com. While the Whopper Freak Out campaign may have been a success for Burger King in terms of its own online exposure, it has a long way to go to catch that of its competitors.