Hitwise has noticed a trend over the last few weeks in the growing popularity of Live Search Cashback. For those unfamiliar with the service, Live Search Cashback helps users get cash back from shopping online. Similar to sites like Eversave, but integrated with the Live Search platform, the cashback program lets you shop anywhere online that participates in the program and collects your cash back savings all in one spot.

According to Hitwise reports, Live Search Cashback was at a 3.75% share of the total traffic to Live.com about eleven weeks ago, but had grown to 6.29% of the total traffic just seven days ago. The statistics delivered by Hitwise also track gender and note that many of these frugal shoppers are female with an income under $100,000 a year.

Live Search Cashback is growing its market share in a tough economic climate, and that alone says a lot about the program, but how does it work? Basically, it requires you to sign up for it, giving it some tracking information so it can follow your shopping and credit your cash back correctly. Once you have the Live Search set up with a Live Search Cashback account, you just remember to do all of your online shopping through the Live Search interface.

As you go about your normal bargain hunting, Cashback via Live Search will list products rated by price and participation in addition to shopping category. As long as you purchase items with the Live Search Cashback indicator logo on them (shown above), your cash back rebates and rewards get credited to your Cashback account. Users of the program can expect to see most rebates and rewards in their account within 60 days, a similar time frame to sites like MyPoints and other points, rewards and cash back programs.

With at least several months of economic crunch ahead of us, if not longer, every penny counts. If you haven’t already signed up for a shopping rewards program, you may want to check out Live Search Cashback and use it to save as many of your hard earned pennies as possible while you buy the items you need. Every penny counts these days, after all.

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Back during my corporate days, we subscribed to the competitive analysis Web services that Hitwise offers. Basically you can see data about your site, upstream and downstream traffic, industry traffic, etc. If I remember, each category was $5k/year (might have been more not 100% sure). The data was great (though it wasn’t always accurate) and I enjoyed studying the reports.

Today Google’s Trends application has added Websites to their free offering. You can now enter a Web site into Google Trends and it gives you back information on unique visitors from Google searches (only a relative graph, no actual numbers), location information, "also visited" and "also searched for". Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land has an in-depth review which every Internet marketer must read.

Note that if you sign-in on Google Trends, you see more detailed information including numbers on the graph.

Now to be fair, this is only for search traffic so it won’t kill Hitwise’s product offering, just injure them slightly. Theis new Google offering sure does provide a massive amount of free data. You can see what your competitors are doing in search and where their site visitors are heading to. It’s also something to consider for organic SEO purposes.

Here’s the CenterNetworks chart:

As expected, U.S. is first in search traffic to CN. I would have expected Germany to be second but they are eigth and India ranks second in inbound search traffic. The charts at the bottom seem like recent traffic only whereas the graph at the top is all-time. The also-visited shows popular social media blogger louisgray first, then techmeme, scobleizer, inquisitr and gigaom rounding out the top 5.

For comparison purposes, here’s Techcrunch’s chart:

With their pagerank 8, they have significantly more search traffic volume than CN. Here we see U.S. first, then Japan followed by India. I am guessing that Techcrunch Japan plays a role there. As for the also visited, it makes sense that crunchbase is first, many of the outbound links on TC point to their tech directory. It’s interesting that Friendfeed ranks fourth, I rarely see them speak about FriendFeed. Other top blogs readwriteweb, gigaom and venturebeat round out the top sites. They have data in the also searched for field which is dominated by youtube terms.

Again, if you are a social media consultant, an analyst, search engine optimizer, or work as an Internet marketer, you should be reviewing this data on your site(s), your competitors and your industry as a whole. I don’t see any feeds available but I am sure someone will hack that up soon. A widget of the data would be excellent as well.

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Hitwise is reporting that visits to the Microsoft Zune Web site jumped 299 percent on Christmas Day. Also noted is market share of visits to Zune.net showed an increase of 392 percent when comparing Christmas Day 2007 to the previous day. The Zune is a popular device on Amazon as well.

Yet even with this massive jump, the Zune still lags iTunes by 6x says Hitwise.

Pricing for the Zune starts at $139 for the 4gb and while that’s a bit less expensive than the iPod Nano, the iPod is still where it’s at. Especially with a $79 shuffle to meet almost any budget. One feature I like about the Zune is the FM Tuner, something that is missing on the iPod. 

What do you think? Will the Zune be able to gain market share in 2008 over the iPod?

Update: Jimmy notes the following about the increase, "yeah it was everyone headed to the support pages"