According to a new study from Web analytics firm Compete, 74% of smartphone owners now primarily use their devices for personal reasons, and they often spent the most amount of time with the device at home.

Location-Aware Coupons

While it doesn't come as a surprise that a lot of consumers would like to receive coupons, one surprising result from Competes report is that 21% of respondents would like to get SMS alerts with promotions when they walk by a store. Another 15% also would like to receive ads via SMS. Chances are that a lot of marketers would like to offer these kinds of location-aware ads and coupons that catch a consumer while they are already out shopping and close to a retailer. At the same time, though, most modern smartphones don't allow developers to create these kind of applications. The iPhone, for example, doesn't (yet) allow developers to run application in the background, which would be necessary if a developer wanted to create a service that could send out ads via SMS based on your location.

Shopping sites like Walmart.com, Target and BestBuy both saw a substantial monthly decline of around 35% compared to December. Amazon, however, only lost 5%, which suggests that the world's most popular online shopping destination relies less on seasonal traffic than most of its competitors.

Tax and Travel Up

With the tax season in the U.S. in full swing, it doesn't come as a surprise that services like HRBlock.com, Intuit.com and Taxactonline.com saw solid growth since December. In total, Compete notes that sites in its "Financial Services: Accountancy and Tax Service" category were up 292% compared to December 2009. Maybe even more importantly, these numbers are also up 11.5% compared to January 2009, which is a strong indicator that more and more people now prepare and file their taxes online. Last week, we talked to representatives from Intuit's Turbotax division, who also noted that the company's online services now post some of Intuit's largest growth rates.

As travelers start to plan their 2010 vacations, sites like HotWire.com (up 32% month-over-month) and TripAdvisor.com (up 24%) also posted solid gains.

Other Notable Numbers: New York Times, CNet, Twitter and Bing

Among news sites in Competes top 50, the New York Times (#50) booked a solid 10% gain since December, while CNN (#32) saw a 1.6% gain. The number of unique visitors to CNet, however, dropped by almost 13% compared to December, and is down 24% year-over-year.

Twitter, which registered a solid 294% year-over-year growth, only saw a 3.35% growth since December.

Bing, Microsoft's new search engine, is now the eleventh most-visited site. It's worth noting that the combination of Live.com and Bing.com attracted around 133 million unique visitors in January 2010, which is on par with Facebook's and Yahoo's numbers.

Google's US traffic grew by just over 1 million visitors between December and January. Facebook's traffic grew by almost 1.5 million. Yahoo's traffic fell by almost 1.5 million users. As Compete's Aaron Prebluda writes, Google passed Yahoo 2 years ago this month "and never looked back." This isn't just jockeying between companies, though. We may be witnessing the eclipse of search by social networking.

Three weeks ago we wrote about other numbers that pointed to the rise of social networking vs search (Why is Google Afraid of Facebook? Because Social Networking Could Soon Pass Search) but those numbers were a little less clear.

As we wrote then:

What would it mean if social networking over-took search in terms of sheer visits online? It would mark a sea-change on the internet. No longer would our dominant use of the web be seeking out web-pages built by HTML web-masters! Now we would all be publishing tiny little updates that perhaps only our friends and family care about. We'd be subscribing, more than we ever did by RSS, to syndicated updates from organizations of interest, large and small. It would be (perhaps will be) a very different era and, to be frank, it's going to be harder to monetize. There will be privacy battles. There will be new platforms for innovation.

It's a pretty big deal. Things will really change if current trends continue and social networking rises to the top... And that's a big reason why Google and Facebook are rivals.

Researching products is still the most popular shopping-related activity on the smartphones. According to Compete's survey, 41% of iPhone users and 43% of Android owners check sale prices while they are shopping. Surely, the popularity of mobile apps like ShopSavvy and RedLaser - which make checking prices as easy as scanning a barcode - will only drive these numbers up in the coming months.

The second most popular shopping-related activity for smartphone owners is finding consumer reviews. 39% of iPhone users and 31% of Android users use their devices for this.

Big-Ticket Items

Only 9% of iPhone users and 11% of Android users said that they would buy big-ticket items over $500 from their phone. In general, the majority of smartphone owners are most likely to buy lower-priced items under $10.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Search Engine Market Share

In the long run, these numbers could obviously turn out to be nothing more than a blip on the radar for Bing. After all, even the numbers for Google fluctuate every month. We also haven't seen numbers for September from other analytics firms like Hitwise or Compete yet, though while they often differ, they usually agree with StatCounter when it comes to general trends.

The question, of course, is why Bing stopped growing last month. Did Microsoft scale back its marketing campaign? Or did users, after the novelty wore off, simply go back to Google?

Interestingly enough, Ask, a search engine few of us think about anymore, continues to grow rapidly. Compared to last month, the number of searches on Ask grew almost 48%, though the company still holds only about 3% of the search engine market.

All eyes are obviously on how the partnership between Bing and Yahoo will work out. Chances are that Bing will continue to grow over the next few months, but, as Compete's Marko Madjarac points out, Yahoo "will need to bring high-quality advertisers whose sponsored search results generate more paid clicks." While Microsoft's data shows that users are quite happy with Bing, we will also have to wait and see what happens once Microsoft slows down its $100 million marketing campaign for Bing.

Maybe this is not a bad thing. Bing clearly excels in some area (travel, health, and shopping, for example) and can easily compete head-to-head with Google when it comes to standard web searches. At the same time, Google's virtual monopoly position in the search arena (even if it's a natural one) wasn't likely to go unchallenged, and wasn't likely to pan out in a positive way for consumers. Now, if we trust these results from Compete's analysis, more users are using a larger variety of search engines instead of just relying solely on Google, which can only be a good thing.

As Rich Devine from ZAAZ points out in the Compete post, some of the early curiosity around Bing was surely driven by Microsoft's marketing campaign around the service. The data, however, also shows that quite a few users are willing to look at alternatives to their favorite search engines.

Not a Typical Week for Search

We have to note, though, that the last week of June was not a typical week for search engines, as the death's of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett drove more users to search engines, and this brought Bing's audience to over 27 million, up from 21 million in the week right after its launch.

As of now, Google's users aren't running away from the service and making Bing their exclusive search engine, and neither are Bing's users completely loyal to their service. In terms of its overall audience, Bing is also still small compared to Google, but this data shows that users might be more willing to explore alternatives than we used to think.

Currently, there are still a number of technical and privacy issues that are holding back some of the most interesting services. Due to the absence of background processing, the current generation iPhone, for example, can't regularly ping a server with a user's location and then send alerts to the phone based on this information. Alerts you have to actively pull up are, after all, not nearly as compelling as automated messages that tell you that you are heading right for a major traffic jam.

Underserved Markets: Local Alerts, Special Offers

Advertisers will also be happy to hear that a large number of consumers would like to receive special offers tailored to their current location, but only a very small number of current smartphone users are actually aware or able to use these services.

According to Compete's Andy deGaravilla, this means that companies that manage to provide users with more compelling and relevant ads based on their location will "likely see higher clickthrough rates and subsequent engagement." At the same time, though, we can't help but wonder if at least some users would also like to simply receive a text message or another kind of alert on their phones if, for example, a nearby store has an offer for them.

User Initiated vs. Background Services

The current generation of location based apps mostly relies on users to initiate the process. It would be interesting to see how consumers would react to a background service that actively monitors a person's location and sends out alerts when a user enters a certain location, for example. Of course, this could get highly annoying quickly, but there is no reason to believe that it couldn't be done right.

To gather its data, Nielsen monitors about 200,000 panel members, a technique that is clearly informed by Nielsen's method for gathering data about TV viewers. Other metrics companies use data from toolbars, ISPs, and other sources, though Quantcast also gives site owners the option to embed a code snippet on their pages that reports data directly to Quantcast (Hulu does so, for example, and so does RWW).

Stats Need Standards

The real problem here, of course, isn't even about knowing exactly how many people watched videos on Hulu last month (even though we have to admit that this discussion is quite interesting in its own right). Instead, this kerfuffle once again shows how hard it is to correctly estimate usage numbers on the web, especially in the absence of any real standards. As every blogger can easily attest, three different stats programs will give you three different numbers.

We have to take publicly available stats, no matter from which provider, with a grain of salt. In our experience, it is always worth looking at a number of different sources, and while the trends that these services show tend to be relatively trustworthy, the exact numbers are always open for debate.

Besides the terms mentioned above, the top ten is rounded out by searches for Barack Obama, the iPhone, AJ Vaynerchuk's PleaseDressMe, music site TheSixtyOne, and FollowFriday.

Some of these search terms are no surprise - but it is definitely interesting that more people searched for the Vaynerchuk brothers than for 'obama.' Compete's Becky Blitzenhofer argues that all of these brands and users used "Twitter aggressively as part of their marketing strategy" - and apparently, this popularity translates into search activity as well (but then, Obama also used Twitter quite aggressively during his election campaign).

It should be noted that this data spans over half a year, so it purposely ignores short-term trends and instead features those search terms that users have consistently searched for over a long period of time. Still, we are somewhat perplexed by some of the terms that appear on this top ten list.

Twitter is slowly integrating the search function deeper into the core of its service. Among other things, it is slowly rolling out a new version of its user profiles, which features a search box (some users already have access to this). These new homepages also feature a prominent link to the top ten trending topics on the service. According to Compete's data, traffic on search.twitter.com kept lagging behind the growth curve of Twitter itself, but given that Twitter never really promoted search.twitter.com, this is really no surprise and we will probably see a major uptick in usage now that Twitter is integrating search into the user profiles.

Compared to some of its competitors, however, some of StatCounter's data points seemed a bit off to us. StatCounter, for example, saw Google's U.S. market-share in January at over 80% (and down from a high of close to 85% last fall), while Hitwise reported 72% for January. StatCounter also sees Mac OSX as hovering around 4% worldwide, while Net Applications reports it at 9.6%. RWW readers, by the way, skew more heavily towards the Mac than the mainstream, as Google Analytics tells us that about 20% of you use Apple's OS.

For mobile operating systems, StatCounter reports that the iPhone is in a neck-and-neck race with the SymbianOS (about 35% each), while AdMob's global stats (PDF) saw Symbian as leading the race with 44% (32% for the iPhone).

Source: StatCounter Global Stats

One nice feature of StatCounter's tool is that it is updated 5 times a day. However, while this would be great if StatCounter was showing us data from specific sites, these frequent updates almost seem like overkill when it comes to the broad categories that the company currently tracks.

Given that there is no universal standard for how to measure these statistics, any of these numbers from any service have to be taken with a grain of salt. StatCounter gets its data from all the sites that use the service, and chances are that the types of sites where StatCounter is installed on inevitably skew the data in one way or another.

Overall, StatCounter is providing a valuable service with this new tool, but users will still have to compare the information from Global Stats with data from other services and draw their own conclusions about the validity of that data.

Interestingly, the ads for online video service Hulu.com only drove an additional 76% to the site. Other online services, like TeleFlora.com  and the somewhat disreputable Cash4Gold.com only saw a modest increase of 65% and 50%.

Career websites like Monster.com and CarrerBuilder.com actually saw their traffic decline by 16% and 17%. Cars.com's reach dropped by 22%, and Etrade, even though it had relatively funny ads, saw its traffic decline by a whopping 57%. These ads clearly only spoke to a small slice of the audience, though it would be interesting to see if and how their traffic recovered in the days following the Super Bowl.

Compete, together win TNS Media, also tracked the traditional and social media buzz around the ads in the days following the Super Bowl. Interestingly, interest in the ads dropped to almost zero within the first two days after the game.

Looking at all the top referrals to both Shutterfly and Snapfish, it is interesting to note that Yahoo - and not Google - drives the largest amount of traffic to both sites.

For November however, the power of Oprah.com is quite interesting. Oprah drove almost 4% of Snapfish's traffic - more than MSN and Comcast combined. As Cynthia Stephens from Compete rightly points out, however, Snapfish now has to find a way to retain these customers. The stats from Compete suggest that Snapfish still has some work to do there.

As we have pointed out in earlier stories, it is hard to underestimate the power of Oprah when it comes to bringing any issue to the attention of mainstream TV viewers. Oprah's podcast with Eckhart Tolle, for example, topped the iTunes charts, while her promotion for Amazon's Kindle gave that device a nice sales bump.

Image of Oprah and Obama used courtesy of Flickr user Joe Crimmings

Compete also compiled engagement metrics for Google Docs, which clearly indicate that the service is still mostly popular with casual users. The average user uses Google Docs about 3 times a month, a number that has held stable for the last 12 months. Interestingly, the average user only spends about 5 minutes per month on the site.

Zoho

Compete also provided us with some additional data about Zoho's office suite, one of Google Docs closest competitors. Zoho saw about 310,000 unique visitors in October, but those users spent close to 10 minutes per month on the service. While this is twice the amount of time users spent on Google Docs, Zoho's users also visit the site about 3 times a month.

Update: We also received some additional information from ClickStream Technologies . ClickStream's survey compares usage numbers for Google Docs, OpenOffice, and Microsoft Word. The results of this survey are very similar to Compete's statistics, both with regards to how often the apps were used and for how long.

Casual Users

Google Docs clearly still mostly attracts casual users. Those users who spend most of their days in word processors and spreadsheets have not switched over to web based productivity applications. About a year ago, we wrote that Google Docs wasn't ready for the enterprise, and this data from Compete shows that, a year later, it still hasn't been adopted by power users (though the Compete study did not look at enterprise and business users, who would be running Google Apps on their own domain).

But in recent years, that has changed. Alexa now faces competition from Compete, which launched a similar public service in 2006 (our coverage), and from Quantcast, which was founded in 2005. Both of those companies gather data from numerous outside sources and their rankings are generally seen as more accurate than Alexa's.

"In recent months we've heard from our Alexa users that understanding Internet usage beyond Alexa Toolbar users was increasingly of interest," wrote Alexa in the announcement of their rankings overhaul. Recent months? The inaccuracy of the toolbar-based rankings has been discussed for years, which is why we think this might be too little, too late for Alexa.

Beyond the problem of public perception, Alexa also still displays their data in non-standard ways. The hard-to-understand pageviews per million, reach per million, and rank are not easily compared to other data sources, which makes Alexa's information less useful than it could be, even if it is presumably now more accurate.

Historical data on Alexa is currently only available for the past 9 months while the company recalculates old data with its new ranking algorithm.