Amazon.co.uk is the second most visited retail website after eBay UK based on UK internet visits and ranks #15 overall, just behind BBC.co.uk and ahead of YouTube. We're all familiar with the retail giant, but from where does Amazon get its traffic? I wanted to share and elaborate on the stats from our recent Technology Guardian column.

One quarter of Amazon's UK traffic comes from Google (combined www.google.co.uk and www.google.com) and 18% from other retail sites. After Amazon, consumers visit Google, other retailers (eBay, Play.com) and other Amazon properties (Amazon Auctions and IMDB).

The following table lists the top 20 websites visited after Amazon.co.uk in the four weeks to 21st July 2007

We're often asked how much of Amazon's traffic is books related and how much is electronics or other. We can't say for sure. Because of the complexity of the site's structure, it is near impossible to separate books from the rest.

What we can say is that from analysis of search terms sending the site traffic Amazon's strengths are definitely in books and electronics. The query “books”, searches for various book titles (“harry potter”, “giles wareing”, “secret church” ), searches for games consoles (“wii”, “xbox 360”) and searches for iPods, were among the top terms sending the site traffic in the four weeks to 21st July 2007.

The following table shows the top 10 non-branded terms sending visits to the site. I've included the paid and organic rate so you can get a sense for the search traffic that is coming from organic versus paid listings. (Amazon received 13% of its traffic from paid listings in the past four weeks).

Heather Hopkins

Heather Hopkins is VP of Research for Hitwise UK. This piece was first posted on Hitwise Analyst blog here.