Digital revival overdue as Target.com leaking visitors

It’s a good thing Target is preparing a major relaunch of its digital platform considering traffic to the company’s website has decelerated this year, according to online measurement firm comScore, which publishes a monthly list of the top 50 U.S. Web properties. Target climbed back into comScore’s to 50 ranking in June with 23.8 million unique visitors. That was enough to secure a 48th place ranking and end a four-month absence from the list, but Target’s June traffic numbers were actually well below the same month the prior year when comScore showed the retailer ranked 43rd with 26.9 million unique visitors.

To be fair, the only other conventional retailer consistently among the top 50 is Walmart, so the fact that Target floats in and out of the rankings is less of a concern than the year-over-year decline in unique visitors given that the online channel is growing.

Target could see some acceleration in July and August related to Back-To-School activity, but the big pop won’t come until later this year when company is expected to make a major marketing push around the relaunch of its website in advance of the holidays. Even if that weren’t the case, holiday shoppers can be relied upon to produce a huge spike in traffic during November and December as was the case last year when comScore pegged Target.com’s number of unique visitors in November 2010 at 39.8 million followed by 37.3 million uniques in December. Given the elevated expectations surrounding the company’s imminent online relaunch failing to handily exceed last year’s traffic numbers would be a huge disappointment.