It will be very interesting to see how the graph below looks some time after yesterday's launch of Games on Google Plus. The use of arbitrary terminology in the graph below is a little confusing, but the simple version is: Google Plus is now more popular among suburban parents and well-off empty nesters than it is among the College and Cafe crowd.

Above: Click for full size. The Y Axis represents how much more likely a group is to visit Plus than the average person included in Hitwise's 10 million people tracked.

At launch Plus was disproportionately popular among people in its "Colleges and Cafes" demographic than any other group, followed closelyby the group Hitwise calls "Status Seeking Singles." Six weeks later, College and Cafe visitors have dropped dramatically, Hitwise says. Status Seeking Singles are now the group most into Plussing, but are tied with a group they call "Kids and Cabernet" ("Prosperous, middle-aged married couples living child-focused lives in affluent suburbs.") and financially comfortable empty nesters are growing fast on the site as well.

Honestly, I don't know that affluent suburban parents or well-off empty nesters really count as mainstream - but the point is, Plussin' 'aint just for college kids and hipsters anymore.

Hitwise is great about publishing timely tidbits about Web statistics and I look forward to seeing U.S., global and China stats contrasted. The first offering along those lines? Hitwise says that microblogging is more common in China than it is in the U.K., U.S., France, Canada, Australia or India. Sina Micro blog, the leading Chinese microblogging service, sees one out of every 158 website visits in China, Hitwise observed last month. That's more than 3.5 times as large a Web market share as Twitter has here in the US. That sounds like a good market to go monitor.

In the U.S., Facebook (which Hitwise does not count as microblogging) sees 64% of all social networking site visits. Why different social networks have found different levels of traction in different countries and cultures will be a fruitful field of study for the future. The investment of one of the most communicative of the Web analytics companies online into the large market of China could be a helpful step in our collective understanding of the changing international Web.

According to Hopkins' article, Facebook not only drives a high amount of traffic, higher than Google News, but its users are far more loyal, as well.

Hitwise data indicate that visitors from Facebook are more loyal to News and Media websites than are visitors from Google News. In particular, among the top 5 Print Media websites in the week ending March 6, 2010, 78% of Facebook users were returning visitors compared to 67% from Google News. The figures are almost identical for Broadcast Media, with a 77% returning rate for Facebook compared to 64% for Google News.

Why do we care about this metric? Because "visitors aren't as valuable if they don't come back. Advertisers and retailers need some assurance that visitors will return again and again." Hopkins notes that even visitors from Google.com, often the leading source of traffic to these sites, are outpaced by those from Facebook when it comes to return visits. But why is this?

Hopkins doesn't get into the "why" behind the numbers, but we'd be willing to wager that it has something to do with a few reasons. First, content posted by peers is more likely to be compatible with an individual's world view. Second, their trust in friends as sources might lead them to return for more.

Google, on the other hand, can give great results just the same as it can lead you to the most worthless pages you've imagined. It doesn't offer that one thing we can all trust - the valued opinion of a friend. It's also possible that the friend making the recommendation in the first place is a return visitor who repeatedly recommends the articles they read.

Whatever the reason, the numbers tell us one thing for sure - news outlets need to focus on making sure it is as easy as possible for readers and viewers to share content on Facebook. Or, as Hopkins so succinctly puts it, "with recent Pew Research showing that Newspapers have seen ad revenue fall 26% during the year and 43% over the past three years, understanding where to find loyal readers is becoming increasingly important."

Bing's success rate is now over 75%, while Yahoo Search still leads among the top search engines with a 79% success rate. As Hitwise's Bill Tancer points out, though, it is important to note that portal search engines generally see simpler queries and more of these queries are navigational or brand queries. Inevitably, these searches tend to have a higher success rate, and while only 9% of the top 100 search terms on Google are brand or navigational searches, these types of searches account for 15.1% of all searches on Yahoo Search and 16.5% of all searches on Bing.

Maybe Measuring Success Rate Isn't the Right Metric for Bing?

It is important to remember that Microsoft's strategy with Bing, however, is to give users more info on the site so that searchers don't even have to leave Bing.com. Because of this, the Bing team probably wants to keep the success rate rather low. It would be interesting to see how many of the searches on Bing that Hitwise would qualify as unsuccessful were actually due to the fact that the user got the answer to a query right on the site.

However, this Black Friday showed a 4 percent increase in site visits versus Thanksgiving Day traffic - a stat that usually falls between those two days. The retail site that got the lion's share of traffic this year was Amazon.com, which netted 13.55 percent of the traffic seen by the top 500 retail websites. Read on for a few surprising stats that might signal changes in the U.S. economy - and changes in how U.S. consumers will be doing their holiday shopping.

The lesson: If you want to see a ridiculous upswing in traffic on a major American retail date, maintain relative stinginess and secrecy, then "leak" good tidings of great joy just before the big day.

Other sites that saw a significant traffic increase in this 48-hour period include Staples (47 percent), Dell (40 percent) and Amazon (9 percent).

So, Apple, Staples and Dell take the cake for getting the greatest traffic spikes overnight; how did websites fare on Black Friday overall?

As you can see in the graph below, Amazon and Walmart each performed admirably. What's more, most sites saw a marginal increase in traffic over last year's Black Friday traffic - as you'll recall, the global economy had recently tanked. Do we see this as a sign of tentative optimism about the economy, at least on the part of American consumers?

Finally, who got the most downstream traffic from Black Friday websites? That would be our friends at Walmart, Best Buy, and Target - the latter of which more than doubled its downstream traffic from last year:

Details for Cyber Monday - traditionally the online retailer's biggest day during the holiday season - will be available shortly.

Traffic to Twitter is declining, Hitwise General Manager of Global Research Bill Tancer writes, while Facebook's growth continues to go through the roof. Facebook is approaching ubiquity, while Twitter's appeal is narrow and its average registered user is totally unengaged. "That being said," Tancer writes, "I still plan to tweet this entry."

Facebook feels more secure though, it's got clearer social hooks and it's easier to start using. As a result, Facebook is probably ten or more times the size of Twitter. As Twitter user Justin Houk put it today, "Twitter is a cult classic in the making - not a blockbuster."

The Hitwise data doesn't take into account the use of 3rd party Twitter clients, but the Twitter website is a more common way to interact with the service and its traffic is a good proxy for overall Twitter use.

What are the relative business prospects for both, long term? It's hard to say, but charts like these from Hitwise have got to make Twitter HQ feel uneasy.

See also: Facebook Has Twitter Envy - But Why? and Twitter and Facebook Investment Terms and Game Plans

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?

It Works, But The Competition is Better

When you are looking for a house, location is a key factor, and just like Zillow, Google Maps puts a house's location at the front and center of its presentation. Looking at houses on Google Maps, however, also quickly makes it clear that Google is only aggregating data from listing web sites and getting its data from brokers who update their listing on Google Base. This means that listings on Google Maps are not necessarily as up to date or as comprehensive as those you could find on similar services.

It is also quite obvious that real estate listings aren't the focus of Google Maps. Google's competition generally offers far more options when searching for a house (type of house, lot size, year built, etc.), and does a better job at displaying other important information about a house and the neighborhood (quality of local schools, for example).

While it is good to see that Google is re-dedicating itself to the real estate market, this is hopefully only the beginning of the company's efforts, because in its current state, these listings on Google Maps are a nice addition to a great product, but don't hold up as a real estate offering in its own right.

Searches for "home depot" registered one of the most stunning declines in paid clicks, as only 0.83% of searches went to a paid listing in the last four weeks, compared to just over 39% a year ago.

Recession? Or are Companies Getting Smarter About Search?

In part, this decline can be explained by the current economic climate, which has led many companies to reduce their search marketing spend. In its latest quarterly earnings report, Google noted that paid clicks across all of its AdSense partners only increased by 3% in the last quarter of 2008, though the search giant didn't release any detailed statistics about paid search traffic.

However, as Andy Beal points out, this reduction in spending on search could also mean that some of the large brands like Orbitz or Home Depot have simply figured out that, given that they are already the #1 search term for their respective brands, there is really no need to spend a lot on paid advertising.

As we reported earlier this month, some retailers have been shifting their budgets away from search-engine marketing and towards email and social marketing. At the same time, though, small number of companies are also looking at the current downturn as a chance to break into new markets, by expanding their spend on search marketing while their competitors are cutting back their spend in these areas.

Oprah's Midas Touch

Now that Twitter has received Oprah's Midas touch, the real question will be to see how many of these new users will stick around. While Oprah devoted a large segment of her show on Friday to Twitter, she did not really explain the service in any great detail.

We will have to see if the majority of new users will actually use the service as intended, or if they will just stick to following celebrities like Oprah, Britney Spears (who also now has more than 1 million followers), or Aston Kutcher, whose race with CNN for reaching more than 1 million followers surely also helped to spark the sudden rush of new Twitter users (and we can't help but wonder whether the effort of a certain group of users to push a fake user account past Kutcher and CNN by creating hundreds of thousands of fake accounts isn't also reflected in these stats).

Blogs and personal websites are only responsible for a very small 1.5% of all traffic.

There is also a lot of traffic that is directly shared between news sites. Outbound traffic from other news sites accounts for just as many visits as traffic from search engines (21.6%).

According to Hitwise, the Drudge Report is the largest single source of visitors to news and media sites. Google News (1.5%), CNN.com (1.4%) and Yahoo! News (0.8%) also drive relatively large amounts of traffic, but it is interesting that no single site really holds anything close to a monopoly here.

The Associated Press and the traditional newspaper business are obviously under a lot of stress right now (and in many ways, Craigslist is the real culprit here - not Google News and portals), but a large part of traffic to news sites is driven by portal sites. We can't blame the AP for trying to protect its intellectual property rights, but, as Google's Eric Schmidt described it, "these are ultimately consumer businesses and if you piss off enough of them, you will not have any more."

Image credit: Flickr user Matt Callow

Another interesting fact about the downstream clicks from Twitter is that very few users go from Twitter.com to retail, business, or finance sites.

Here are a few other interesting findings:

• after visiting Twitter.com, more users visit Etsy.com, the marketplace for buying all things handmade, than Amazon
• in terms of downstream clicks, CNN.com is the most popular news service on Twitter
• Yahoo Mail gets more downstream clicks than Gmail or Windows Live Mail

One caveat about this data that Hitwise does not mention, however, is that a large number of Twitter users never even visit Twitter.com because they use more fully-featured desktop or mobile clients like Twhirl, TweetDeck, or Tweetie. Hitwise obviously doesn't have access to this data, but it would be interesting to see if those Twitter users who use a Twitter client exhibit a different behavior compared to those who use the web site.

Across the top Google properties, Gmail is now #2, trailing only Google search. However, even with the second position, Gmail is still under 10% of all visits. This is still up 70% from the same week last year, beating YouTube's overall growth of 16% in the same time frame.

Looking at the growth trend between YouTube and Gmail shows how dramatically Gmail has grown over the past year. Gmail has been on a steep, steady growth line while YouTube's fortunes have reversed a number of times. When comparing Gmail to other popular webmail clients Yahoo! Mail and Windows Live Mail, it has a ways to go to get close to capturing the market share of those other products.

Finally, Hitwise reported on the top three sources of traffic to Gmail year-over-year, and the majority of referrals, as could be guessed, is Google itself with 48.83%, up 10% since last year. The runners up are Facebook with 4.37% and Yahoo! Mail with 4.29%. Yahoo! Mail referrals dropped 18% from last year. To us this appears that while adoption of Gmail is growing, it may be as a result of people choosing one web mail provider over another.

Hitwise's latest data also confirms that Google's market share in the search business is continuing to grow at a steady clip (9% year-over-year). Year-over-year, all of Google's larger competitors lost ground, though at least between December and January, both Yahoo and Ask.com saw a very minor increase in their market share.

Longer Search Queries

Year-over-year, using one and two-word search engine queries became slightly less popular, while the number of three-word queries remained flat. Instead, a growing number of users are now opting to use longer queries. Overall, longer search queries have increased ten percent over the last year.

This is an interesting trend, and it could be interpreted in a variety of way. This could mean that a growing number of users is finding less value in the search results they get from relatively unspecific, short queries. It could also indicate that users are becoming more sophisticated in how they structure their queries when they are looking for very specific answers.

Do you have a theory why more users are turning to longer search queries? Feel free to let us know in the comments.

According to Hitwise's Heather Hopkings, Google came very close to catching up with MapQuest in December, but somehow, MapQuest managed to gain some ground again in January. Currently, MapQuest holds 39.49% of the market share in the US and Google Maps is at 35.67%.

Update: Hitwise just supplied us with a new graph that includes data for Live Maps and Yahoo Maps.

What is even more interesting, though, is that most of MapQuest's traffic comes from 'brand searches' - that is users who specifically search for 'mapquest.' Eight out of the top ten search terms leading to MapQuest were variations of its brand name and they accounted for 62% of MapQuests' visitors. For Google Maps, only two out of the top ten search terms were branded and they only accounted for 4.2% of Google Maps' traffic.

Old Habits

It is quite amazing how MapQuest manages to hang on to its top position. Google Maps gets over 60% of its traffic from Google itself, yet it seems that using MapQuest, even though it is barely keeping up with the latest technological advancements on the Internet, is still synonymous with online mapping for a majority of Internet users.

In many ways, this means that a service like Microsoft's Live Maps, which is holding on to a very distant third fourth place, is fighting an uphill battle, even though it provides a number of features like its Birds Eye View that even Google Maps doesn't have. For a lot of mainstream users, however, having access to the latest features doesn't necessarily translate into a reason to switch away from an established service.