In recent months, Web traffic at top banking companies has been growing at a faster rate than the Web as a whole. For example, at the ten busiest sites in April (see Table 1), traffic is up five-fold from a year ago. One-third of the total gain is from one company, X.com that has experienced explosive growth with its PayPal email payments system
For the most part, Web traffic correlates strongly with the size of the company’s existing customer base and/or the amount of advertising expended. After X.com, the most trafficked sites are those with the biggest checking account bases: BankAmerica, Wells Fargo, and so on. The smaller banks on the list, NetBank and SFNB, for instance, have been driving traffic with multi-million dollar advertising campaigns, although those will likely be scaled back now that investors have suddenly taken a critical view of large-scale branding expenses.

Table 1

unique monthly visitors in thousands (‘000s)

Table 2

unique monthly visitors in thousands (‘000s)

Source: PC Data Online www.pcdataonline.com ; blanks indicate traffic below min. threshold; Gomez Advisors for Spring 2000 Online Banking Scorecard, rank among 57 banks www.Gomez.com

¹Rollups are straight additions of the Websites shown, overlap in users has NOT been factored out; ² Autonomous unit of Ameritrade, not a chartered bank but provides statement aggregation services and financial info.

Each of the three companies tracking Web traffic have different methodologies and unique user panels, so estimates of Web traffic can differ dramatically. Below (Table 3) are the Feb. figures for home usage from Nielsen/NetRatings. The shaded Web sites are financial services offerings. The non-shaded sites are more focused on financial news and stock quotes. 

Table 3

unique monthly visitors in thousands