Top US websites enjoy high visitor retention rates

Nielsen//NetRatings announced the leaders in three key Web categories - search, career development and multi-category travel - enjoyed high month-over-month visitor retention rates from June to July, but also experienced significant audience overlap with the other top players in their categories. Among the categories, search providers had the highest visitor retention rates, with an average of 71% of June visitors at home returning in July among the three leading players. Google Search led with a retention rate of 79%, followed by Yahoo! Search at 69% and MSN/Windows Live Search with 65%. Visitor retention rates were slightly higher among the work audience, with an average of 76% among the three leading search providers.

Notably though, a substantial portion of visitors went to more than one of these three search sites in July. MSN/Windows Live Search had the highest audience overlap, with 84% of its unique visitors also going to Google Search, Yahoo! Search, or both. Yahoo! Search had a 78% audience overlap with Google and/or MSN, while Google Search had a 63% audience overlap with one or both of its two primary competitors.

The top three sites in the career development category, CareerBuilder Network, Monster and Yahoo! HotJobs, experienced a similar phenomenon, although to a lesser degree. They had an average month-over-month audience retention rate of 38% at home; at work, it was 44%. Monster.com had the most audience overlap with the other two, at 50%. Yahoo! HotJobs had a 45% audience overlap, while CareerBuilder Network's was 34%.

Compared to the other two categories, the top sites in multi-category travel, Expedia, Orbitz Worldwide Network and Travelocity, had the lowest average month-over-month at home visitor retention rates, at 31%. At work it was slightly higher, at 35%. Audience overlap was fairly similar between the three properties, at 59, 58 and 51% for Orbitz, Travelocity and Expedia, respectively.

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