My company partners with 17 leading comparison shopping engines, and we are often asked by merchants to recommend the right engines for them.  While we can certainly make suggestions based on the products that they sell or the past results of similar retailers with whom we have worked, we like to have additional data points to help merchants set an intelligent strategy.

One source for objective and normalized traffic and demographic information about comparison shopping engines is Alexa.com.  Similar to the services provided by sites like Ranking.com and ComScore, Alexa aggregates data from users who have downloaded their proprietary toolbar.  This browser plug-in measures the popularity of hundreds of thousands of websites while dividing those results in the demographic dimensions of the Alexa user base.  Thus, if you want to know whether a website is more popular amongst members of a particular age group, gender or level of education, Alexa can provide some estimates to guide you.

I recently compiled some Alexa numbers about our 17 comparison shopping engine partners in order to help our merchants better understand the differentiation between these sites. (We are currently working on a really interesting stealth project that will provide further insight in this area. I hope to announce it in a couple of months.)   Here is what I learned:

When comparing traffic fluctuations amongst these top engines, it is no surprise that the recently-launched Bing Cashback is the fastest-growing one.  We didn’t even include it in the graph below for that reason.  Aside from Bing, the engines that are growing in popularity this year are TheFind (91.6% improvement in traffic ranking), Buzzillions (88.4% improvement), NexTag (52.8% improvement) and PriceGrabber (49.1% improvement).  There were some minor drop-offs amongst a couple of engines, but most of them maintained their popularity or improved thus far this year.

With regard to gender, the engines that are popular with males are buySAFE (by a wide margin), Google Base, Amazon and PriceGrabber.  The engines that are popular with females are like.com (by a wide margin), Shop.com, SortPrice, Become.com and Smarter.com.

When it comes to age, the most popular engines amongst people under 34 years old are Yahoo Shopping, Google Base, Bing Cashback, TheFind and like.com.  The most popular engines amongst shoppers whose age exceeds 55 years are Shopzilla, Pronto, Smarter.com, and Become.com.

The Alexa data also breaks down the demographics by education level and by the source of the IP address from which the user logged on to each comparison engine.  From this data, we can assume that TheFind, PriceGrabber, Shop.com and Buzzillions are much less popular amongst students than Google Base and Shopping.com.

Whether a merchant should be making any decisions based on nebulous third-party data from a source like Alexa is certainly debatable.  I always recommend that you perform your own tests to draw your own conclusions for your own business.  If you have the time to invest three figures to find out if you can earn five or six figures on an additional comparison engine, then I always think you’re better off defying the demographic data that you might see here.