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There’s surely yodeling and exclamation points galore over at Yahoo, which in July was the most-visited site on the Web, ComScore announced Aug. 21.
ComScore said that back-to-school shopping, fashion- and accessories-hunting, searches on consumer goods sites for school supplies and searches for online coupons were all particular drivers of traffic during the month.
Yahoo received 196.6 million unique visitors during the month. Second-place Google (or rather, what ComScore calls “Google Sites,” just as it refers to “Yahoo Sites”) had 192.3 million unique visitors; third-place “Microsoft Sites” had 179.6 million visitors; and Facebook, in fourth place, had 142.3 million.
Yahoo hasn’t topped the monthly ranking—a distinction normally reserved for Google—since May 2011, ComScore confirmed to Marketingland, which was quick to report on the Yahoo win.
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer celebrated a full year on the job in July, and part of her effort to rebrand Yahoo and boost revenue has included acquisitions, of which there have been more than a dozen under Mayer’s leadership. The largest of these—for which Yahoo paid $1.1 billion—was blogging site Tumblr, visits to which were not included in Yahoo’s monthly total.
“Tumblr is not currently included in the Yahoo Sites roll-up,” ComScore told Marketingland in a statement. “Seems there are other factors at play, and given how close Yahoo Sites and Google have been in recent months, it can likely just be normal season/month-to-month fluctuations.”
Also important to note, as AllThingsD’s Liz Gannes pointed out Aug. 21, is that the ComScore figures “don’t include the all-important category of mobile.”
Still, among those factors at play are the changes Mayer has made at Yahoo and the attention she’s stirred up for the brand.
The second quarter of 2013, Mayer said during Yahoo’s July 18 earnings call, was “one of the most productive in the history of Yahoo.”
“We basically reached a pace of launching a new product every week and a significant new product at that. We have made real progress over the last year,” Mayer continued.
Following quarter-after-quarter of Web traffic decline, in June the company “achieved crossover,” and is now experiencing year-over-year growth, effectively erasing the declines of the last year,” Mayer went on to say.
During the earnings call, which was Webcast, Mayer showed a graph of Yahoo’s traffic, saying that it was notable for a few reasons.
“This is our PC and mobile traffic combined. Mobile has absolutely been a strong area of traffic growth for us. Also, the graph does not include Tumblr and IMAP [Internet message access protocol] email users. … We simply count one page view, despite the fact that the user may actually get multiple pages of information. In other words, these measures are conservative,” said Mayer.
“Renewed traffic growth in the face of multiple years of decline is, to my knowledge, unprecedented among industry players that operate with billions of page views,” Mayer continued, “and we’ve achieved just that.”
While Google, seasonal blip behind it, may be expected to be back on top in August, Mayer suggested that Yahoo’s traffic successes are no fluke.
Yahoo has been increasing the quality of its offering and speeding up how quickly it releases new products, she said, as well as “giving our users more inspiration, more delight, and more reasons to use our products all the time.”
Follow Michelle Maisto on Twitter.