Traffic moving towards MSN maps and direction services
MSN’s new maps and direction feature named virtual earth was launched a couple of weeks ago, competing with Google maps on the exact same market segment. The software giant’s portal could expect a large audience from launching day. Still, market analysts were not anticipating recent Nielsen/Netrating market research. Virtual earth, reports Nielsen research, was the #1 growing week to week traffic over the past 2 weeks, garnering an astonishing unique audience traffic increase of 175% for home internet users and 71% for work online searchers.
Satellite maps is a captivating feature for online audience, people want to visualize known places from an unfamiliar perspective. The newest satellite imagery technologies provide sharp accurate views and keep improving online experience.
Microsoft’s maps and direction service was given a combined weekly unique audience of over 2.7 million visitors versus 5.2 millions for Google maps for the last week of July. However Google was receiving a very slight traffic decrease over the same period if compared to its usual traffic range which confirms MSN’s smart moves towards investing in this new market segment.
Search engines are developing the next step in local search, helping online searchers finding answers to their neighborhood queries. First years of search enhancements have rapidly emphasized search marketing globalization and forgot local consumers. The “near me” tool displaying alternative results for local searchers on MSN search engine was an interesting improvement in that direction. In the meantime Google launched a new beta engine dedicated to finding local businesses and services in your area.
Google’s experience in rendering accurate search engines results for a given query is successfully applied in local search marketing while enhanced by a useful and crystal clear satellite imagery feature gives the leading search engine a serious advantage. Nevertheless MSN search recent SERP (search engine result pages) improvements and probably tens of millions of dollar invested in a built from scratch search engine would show a constant traffic growth over competitors Google and Yahoo.
