Where’s the Web traffic

Adding food and consumables to the product mix in stores has proven effective at increasing customer traffic, but a different situation appears to exist online where the company is experience a lack of unique visitor growth. That’s according to the online audience measurement firm comScore, which shows traffic to Target.com during October totaling a little less than 27.6 million unique visitors compared with the prior year when the figure was 27.1 million unique visitors. The lack of online traffic growth caused Target to slip to 40 in comScore’s monthly top 50 Web properties report from 31 last year.

Asimilar situation existed in September when Target.com fell to number 42 on the list from 35 the prior year, as the number of unique visitors held steady at about 25.6 million compared with the prior year.

Conversely, Walmart.com in October drew nearly 36 million unique visitors compared with 31.8 million the same month last year, and in September Walmart.com attracted 35.9 million visitors compared to the prior year’s 31.1.

Customer traffic to Target.com and Walmart.com in November will swell appreciably from the October figures, but the number to watch will be the comparison with the prior year’s traffic.