$16.4 billion has been spent online, this holiday season so far (starting from the beginning of November), according to the firm. That’s a 16% increase from last year. Cyber Monday spending itself was up 17%.

“Despite some news reports suggesting that Cyber Monday might be declining in importance, the day has once again set an online spending record at nearly $1.5 billion,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. “However, it is also clear that the holiday promotional period has begun even earlier this year, with strong online sales occurring on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday. Now, we shall see the extent to which continuing and attractive retailer promotions are able to boost sales for the remainder of the week.”

The top product categories for growth on Cyber Monday, compared to last year, were Digital Content & Subscriptions, which grew by 28%, Consumer Electronics, which grew by 25%, Computer Hardware, which grew by 22%, Video Games, Consoles & Accessories, which grew by 18%, and Jewelry & Watches, which grew by 17%.

Interestingly, close to half of dollars spent online at U.S. websites originated from work computers (47.1%), according to comScore. That’s actually down from last year. Buying at U.S. websites from international locations accounted for 5.7% of sales.

“The term ‘Cyber Monday’ was coined by Shop.org in 2005 to refer to the significant jump in e-commerce spending that occurred following the Thanksgiving holiday weekend as consumers got back to sitting in front of computer screens at work,” said Fulgoni. “At the time and for several years afterward, Cyber Monday was often misconstrued as the heaviest online spending day of the year, when in fact it barely cracked the top ten days of the season. However, with the passage of time, the day grew in importance as a result of an increasing number of retailers offering very attractive deals on the day and extensive digital media coverage making sure that consumers were aware of them. As a result, Cyber Monday has assumed the mantle of top online spending day for the past two years – a trend we expect to hold once again in 2012.”

Here’s a comparison of online spending for each week of the holiday season, for this year and the previous four:

Experian Hitwise has put out some data on online retail traffic for Cyber Monday. According to them, traffic increased 11% year-over-year, and the top 500 retail sites received over 206.8 million total U.S. visits. For Black Friday, online retail traffic increased 7% versus 2011 as those sites received over 193.8 million total U.S. visits. On Thanksgiving Day, according to Experian Hitwise, online retail traffic increased 6% versus 2011 as those sites received over 192.5 million total US visits.

“So far this past Holiday week of online traffic from Thanksgiving Day to Cyber Monday to retail sites is up 8% for 2012 vs. 2011,” a spokesperson for the firm tells WebProNews. “Amazon.com remained the top visited retail site on Cyber Monday while Walmart received the second most visits. BestBuy was the 3rd most visited site with Target and JC Penney rounding out the top five.”

“Among the top 5 sites, Amazon saw the biggest year-over-year growth at 36%.Amazon.com was the top visited retail site on Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday,” he adds. “Walmart was the #2 site each of those days.”

He also says consumer optimism is at an all-time high for this holiday weekend and retailers could see significant traffic gains for 2012 versus 2011.

“Last year Cyber Monday claimed the prize as the busiest shopping day of the year, growing from 138 million online visits to 177 million total US visits to the top 500 Retail sites, a 29% growth comparing 2011 to 2010,” he says. “Last year, Cyber Monday, Black Friday and Thanksgiving were the top 3 Email Transaction days during the holiday season.”

Online payments giant PayPal saw a 190% increase in global mobile payment volume on Cyber Monday, compared to the same day in 2011. That follows Black Friday, when PayPal saw its biggest mobile shopping day to date, and the company says it saw 44% more payment volume on Cyber Monday than Black Friday. PayPal saw 166% increase in the number of customers shopping with mobile devices on Cyber Monday 2012 as compared to last year. Shoppers in Houston, Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York made the most purchases through PayPal on Cyber Monday this year.

Cyber Monday was pretty huge for Etsy too.

Key findings are as follows:

• Google accounted for 65.09% of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending August 27, 2011.
• Bing-powered search comprised 28.99% of searches for the month
• Yahoo! Search and Bing receiving 15.89 percent and 13.10 percent, respectively.
• The remaining 64 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis report accounted for 5.92 percent of U.S. searches.

That last point really drives home just how hard it is to compete in the search market in the U.S. 64 engines together make up less than 6% and the top three are really the top 2 (I assume if you’re reading this, you’re familiar with the Yahoo/Bing deal).

Google is down by a percent, Bing-powered search is up by 3%. Yahoo specifically is up 5% and Bing specifically is up 1%.

Another interesting finding is that longer search queries, classified as those averaging five to eight words or more, increased by 3% month-to-month.

I wonder if the increase in longer search queries is a testament to people getting better at searching or the search engines not delivering as well on the shorter ones.

Most of the list looks pretty familiar, but we couldn’t help but notice that Mashable was on the list, registering a -40% hit in downstream traffic from Google in the U.S. At a quick glance, it would seem to indicate that Mashable was lumped in with sites like eHow, EzineArticles, and Associated Content. However, Mashable is a different breed of site, which makes us very skeptical that Google is actually looking at Mashable’s content in any different and significant way.

The fact is that Mashable is a news site. Most of the sites affected negatively are more focused on evergreen content. News and evergreen content simply work in different ways when it comes to search. That’s not to say that Mashable doesn’t have evergreen content. It does. But when you’re primarily a news-oriented site, your search traffic is not always going to be consistent. We know. We’re in this business too.

You can have a big hit in Google one day, then not as much the next. You can have a good week of lots of good news-based search traffic. Then not have as much luck the next. This can fluctuate all the time. I suspect this is more the reason Mashable is on that list, rather than the Panda update having a significantly negative impact on the site.

Mashable almost certainly gets a lot more traffic from other sources (besides Google) than a lot of the other sites on the list do. Mashable undoubtedly gets tons of traffic from social sites like Facebook and Twitter, not to mention links from other news sites, as it’s one of the most prominent sites in the social media/tech news space. By nature, Mashable is much less dependent on Google for traffic than a site like eHow or EzineArticles (though these sites are making efforts to become less dependent on Google).

The data Hitwise/Forbes has provided shows (allegedly) what percentage of outgoing Google traffic has been going to pages from the sites listed. As Jeff Bercovici of Forbes writes, “Hitwise looked at downstream traffic from Google — ie. what sites do users surf to next after visiting Google.com. In the first two weeks of January, 0.57 percent of those who departed Google next visited a site operated by Demand Media, the best known of the content farms.”

As I’m still seeing Mashable consistently show up on the first page of Google results, I don’t imagine any significant loss is a permanent change, if the data is even accurate. It’s worth noting that in recent data from SearchMetrics, Mashable was one of the top post-Panda winners in the UK, with a 22.61% visibility increase.

There are some interesting findings here indeed. Forbes was kind enough to share a spreadsheet of the data, looking at U.S. weekly downstream traffic from Google.com to selected sites. The spreadsheet would appear to show the true top losers of the Panda update in the U.S.

Click image to see larger version

It’s worth noting that not all of the data here is necessarily representative of Panda – just Google traffic in general. Believe it or not, Panda is not the only thing that can come into play here.

The thing that has everybody talking is the -40% hit Demand Media has taken in downstream traffic from Google in the U.S. Demand Media’s Answerbag took a -80% hit, LiveStrong took a -57% hit, and the company’s real bread and butter site, eHow, took a -29% hit. That’s from January 08 to April 23.

The usual suspects are also included on the list. For the same time period, Articlebase, the top loser on this list, took a -83% hit, Suite101 took a -79% hit, Mahalo took a -78% hit, EzineArticles took a -77% hit, HubPages took a -67% hit, and Yahoo’s Associated Content took a -61% hit.

Again, this is just up to three days ago from close to the beginning of the year. I wonder how the patterns will develop for these sites after another month or two.

Also worth noting – Overstock.com is on the list at -32%. Just this week, the company announced that they are no longer in “Google’s Penalty Box”.

Among the winners: Walmart, JC Penney (interesting considering recent events), Forbes, Whitepages, Etsy, eBay, YouTube (a discussion on whether this is justified here), YellowPages, and About.com.

Taming the Panda

If you are one of Panda’s victims, you’ve likely already been doing your fair share of site evaluation (and perhaps business model evaluation) and soul searching. There are many factors to consider when trying to get your site up to Google’s code for quality. Of course nobody knows exactly what that code is, but there are plenty of hints and starting points. We’ve looked at a lot of them here.

SEO Jim Boykin wrote an interesting piece about Panda, with a bit of a history lesson, referencing Google’s “supplemental index,” which was heavily discussed about 5 years ago.

“I believe that after they removed the ability to clearly see which pages are in the supplemental results, that they then went on a binge of putting way way more % of pages into this ‘Supplemental index’,” he says. “So something to understand today with Panda is that google was already pretty good at tossing the majority of everyone’s pages on their sites into the supplemental results. At least the Deep Pages, and the Pages with Little content, and the pages of dup content…”

He goes on to talk about different signals Google has added to its algorithm since then, and looks at post Panda interviews with Google that we have looked at in the past (see all of our past Panda coverage here). Boykin’s lengthy article is worth a read, but he concludes that the biggest question site-owners should be asking themselves (to avoid Panda Hell) is: “How do I get people to not quickly go back to the same google search?”

The answer, I would say, is to provide as much relevant information as possible to answer the questions users are likely seeking the answers to. Of course you have to consider that Google has a total of over 200 different factors it’s looking at.

Do you think Bing has better search results than Google? Tell us what you think. 

In a recent report discussing Bing’s improved market share — something the tech journalism sector is going wild about, but if I’m not mistaken, 68 percent is far greater than 27.4 — Experian Hitwise made the bold statement that, because Bing users click search engine results 81.54 percent of the time, compared to 65.58 percent for Google users, Bing’s results are more accurate than Google’s.

WebProNewsWho has better results: Bing or Google?3 hours ago 2 likes 11 comments

Experian Hitwise found that Bing’s market share rose from 10.60% in December to  12.81% in January. As we pointed out in a previous post, Bing didn’t simply steal users away from its partner Yahoo, either. 

Of course, considering the spat between Google and Bing, and Bing’s use of at least a small percentage of Google’s search engine results, it adds more skepticism to Hitwise’s claim.

As many of you know, the principle idea in “correlation does not equal causation” is one thing does not necessarily cause another, or in the case of Google and Bing’s search result accuracy, one piece of data (more Bing users click the results) does not make bold conclusions true (Bing’s results are more accurate).

Image courtesy

Taken at face value, it’s easy to conclude Bing’s results are 16 percent more accurate, but then, when you consider so many more people are using Google to conduct Internet searches, the margin for non-clicks for any number of reasons — incorrect spelling, refining the original search query — is a lot larger than Bing’s.

Furthermore, what is the average experience level of Bing users?  If Bing users are comprised predominantly of “Internet noobs,” for lack of a better term, would they not be more inclined to click the first result they saw, even if it was relevant or not? If Google’s users are “more experienced,” would they not be more selective about which results they clicked?

And if that’s the case, doesn’t that mean the overall quality of search results — across the board, not just with Google — need to be improved?

As for Google’s results being less accurate than Bing’s, before making such a claim, much more research is needed: an extensive, side-to-side comparison of multiple queries, not just reliance on how frequently the results were clicked.  Another obvious aspect to consider is the user’s experience level.  An Internet veteran will not click everything they see; whereas an Internet novice using Bing because they liked their witty “search overload” commercials is not as selective.

In regards to Hitwise’s conclusion, as told via Internet chat lingo, the following statement comes to mind:  More clicks != better quality of results. 

You need more data to make such a profound conclusion.

Agree? Disagree? Let us know in the comments.

And now, the Googler Supreme, Matt Cutts, has thrown his two cents into the fray.  Needless to say, he didn’t agree with Hitwise’s “conclusion” either. 

In his Google Buzz post, Cutts asks:

Not only that, but when asked, Hitwise couldn’t even define what they considered a successful search:

So here comes Hitwise, armed with incomplete data that’s rife with variability biases, and they can’t even define what they consider a successful search engine query?  If that’s the case, their entire “Bing is more accurate than Google” thesis should be thrown out the window.

Now, this is not an attack on Bing.  If you use Microsoft’s search engine and you like the results it gives, more power to you.  That doesn’t mean, however, Hitwise should be given a free pass when they deliver erroneous conclusions that ignore each engine’s market share.

Are Bing’s results more accurate than Google’s?  I really don’t know and without extensive, side-by-side comparisons of numerous queries performed by equal-sized groups, neither do the rest of us.

Ultimately, it all comes down to preference.

And now, the Googler Supreme, Matt Cutts, has thrown his two cents into the fray.  Needless to say, he didn’t agree with Hitwise’s “conclusion” either. 

In his Google Buzz post, Cutts asks:

Not only that, but when asked, Hitwise couldn’t even define what they considered a successful search:

So here comes Hitwise, armed with incomplete data that’s rife with variability biases, and they can’t even define what they consider a successful search engine query?  If that’s the case, their entire “Bing is more accurate than Google” thesis should be thrown out the window.

Now, this is not an attack on Bing.  If you use Microsoft’s search engine and you like the results it gives, more power to you.  That doesn’t mean, however, Hitwise should be given a free pass when they deliver erroneous conclusions that ignore each engine’s market share.

Are Bing’s results more accurate than Google’s?  I really don’t know and without extensive, side-by-side comparisons of numerous queries performed by equal-sized groups, neither do the rest of us.

Ultimately, it all comes down to preference.

And now, the Googler Supreme, Matt Cutts, has thrown his two cents into the fray.  Needless to say, he didn’t agree with Hitwise’s “conclusion” either. 

In his Google Buzz post, Cutts asks:

Not only that, but when asked, Hitwise couldn’t even define what they considered a successful search:

So here comes Hitwise, armed with incomplete data that’s rife with variability biases, and they can’t even define what they consider a successful search engine query?  If that’s the case, their entire “Bing is more accurate than Google” thesis should be thrown out the window.

Now, this is not an attack on Bing.  If you use Microsoft’s search engine and you like the results it gives, more power to you.  That doesn’t mean, however, Hitwise should be given a free pass when they deliver erroneous conclusions that ignore each engine’s market share.

Are Bing’s results more accurate than Google’s?  I really don’t know and without extensive, side-by-side comparisons of numerous queries performed by equal-sized groups, neither do the rest of us.

Ultimately, it all comes down to preference.

• Search has been the major driver of traffic of Quora over the past 6 months and accounted for nearly 49% of the visits last week.
   
• Social Networks like Facebook and Twitter have also been key as users can share their both their questions and answers among their networks.
   
• Among the visitors to website, the top 5 Mosaic segments represented 42% of all visits to Quora for the 12 weeks ending February 5, 2011.
   
• The large share of the audience tends to be characterized by college-educated professionals, along with students poised to join those same segments following graduation.
   
• For example, the largest segment currently visiting Quora is Major University Towns, which is primarily made up of students and young adults under the age of 35.
   
• The Young Cosmopolitans segment is another strong segment for Quora, which tends to be the early adopters typically among the first to discover new websites.

A disclaimer: it’s of course far too early to say whether the traffic bump will be permanent.  People who are eager to save money may prove happy to go to whatever site can offer them the best bargain, meaning media coverage of another great deal could turn this all on its head in a single day.

Still, Bill Tancer wrote this afternoon, "In a previous post less then two months ago we analyzed the difference between Groupon and LivingSocial visitors.  At the time, visits to Groupon outnumber those to LivingSocial by a factor of 10-1. . . .  Fast forward to last week.  LivingSocial has closed the gap, now with over half the visits of group coupon leader Groupon."

Then Tancer added, "LivingSocial’s 80% traffic surge last week (and Groupon’s 20% decline in the same time period) proves that the race for dominance in the group coupon space is far from over.  With LivingSocial still exhibiting a healthy component of early adopters, Google launching a competitive offer and rumors that Facebook might enter the fray, I think I would have taken the $6 billion."

It should be interesting to see where this goes.  Perhaps LivingSocial will get an acquisition offer of its own as Google tries to build up Google Offers.

Or Google Offers could just come out of nowhere and, with the support of the search engine giant (its market cap is $197.6 billion right now), take over the sector.