Web customers may click, but do they stick?

E*TRADE, TD Waterhouse and ShareBuilder.com operate the most effective online sites in the brokerage industry, according to a new index published by a leading Internet research firm.

In banking, honors go to Bank of America Corp. of Charlotte, N.C., Wells Fargo & Co. of San Francisco and KeyCorp of Cleveland.

Jupiter Media Metrix in New York rated the firms based on its new Core Rating of Online Effectiveness system, a revealing, if subjective, scorecard.

Though trading volume online is down sharply from a couple of years ago, and many brokerages and banks are cutting back sites to save money, the future still is expected to play out online, according to experts.

“We’ve seen adoption of the [Internet] become mainstream over the last few years, and people’s finances are naturally suited to the medium,” says Stuart Rubinstein, senior vice president of marketing for TD Waterhouse in New York.

“Money is really bits and bytes; it can be an intangible as it moves back and forth electronically. And people are very comfortable with getting a visual picture of that on the screen to see how they’re doing. Plus they can do it 24 hours a day.”

In fact, another recently released study, by Nielsen/NetRatings of Milpitas, Calif., reports that finance and investment sites are the “stickiest” on the web.

broadly rated

More than 44% of active online users visited a finance-related website at least once in July, the study reported.

The average visitor stayed for 21 minutes and 33 seconds. News and information sites were second stickiest on the web, capturing visitors for an average of 15 minutes and 47 seconds.

“Americans are really moving beyond online shopping to trusting the [Internet] as a very secure way of interacting with the bank,” says Sanjay Gupta, the head of e-commerce marketing for Bank of America.

Jupiter’s Core system is perhaps the first tool to rate financial services companies broadly on performance metrics as well as volume-related measurements such as the number of visitors.

“If you look at unique visitors only, it can be very misleading versus something like Core, where firms are on top for a variety of reasons,” says James Van Dyke, who directs the creation of what Jupiter intends to be a quarterly index.

Among the factors folded into Core is the amount of time that visitors spend on the site, the number of visits to the site per month and customer loyalty as measured by the company’s effectiveness in bringing offline customers to the site.

By those measures, TD Waterhouse, Boston’s Putnam Investments Inc. and American Century Services Corp. of Kansas City, Mo., drew the most “intense visitors” among brokerages, according to Core, outpacing some higher-volume sites, such as that of Charles Schwab & Co. Inc. of San Francisco.

Sites operated by Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup Inc. and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., both of New York, dominate the unique-visitor rankings for online banking sites.

But KeyCorp, Chicago’s Bank One Corp. and FleetBoston Financial Corp. had the most stickiness, according to the rating system. That enabled KeyCorp to place third overall among banks.

Seeking services

According to Nielsen/NetRatings, Schwab.com was the stickiest overall financial site in January, with visitors spending an average of one hour and 48 minutes there, nearly 11 minutes more than at second-place Datek.com, operated by Datek Online Financial Services LLC of Jersey City, N.J.

E*TRADE Group Inc. of Menlo Park, Calif., placed third, Omaha, Neb.-based Ameritrade Holding Corp.’s Ameritrade.com fourth and CSFBdirect fifth. Jupiter measured loyalty by calculating how often secure visitors to a given website also visit at least one other site in the same industry category.

If customers often visit websites of other financial brands, Core’s reasoning went, a respective brokerage or bank may not be offering all of the services or the utility the consumer is seeking.

New York’s Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc., Bellevue, Wash.-based Netstock Corp.’s ShareBuilder.com, and CSFBdirect.com, a site now operated by Harris Investor Services LLC, placed best in this category among brokerages.

KeyCorp, PNC Financial Services Group Inc. of Pittsburgh and AmSouth Bancorp. of Birmingham, Ala., led bank sites.

Among brokerages, E*TRADE finished on top, Mr. Van Dyke says, in large part because of its high traffic rating, both in terms of unique visitors and in numbers of visits to the site.

E*TRADE has been trying to cut its reliance on stock-trading volume by diversifying into online banking services such as lending and tax advice. Its executives weren’t available for comment.

Despite having significantly lower traffic than E*TRADE’s site, tdwaterhouse.com stands out because it had the highest intensity ratings in its industry.

Mr. Rubinstein believes one reason the site is getting people to stick around is that it recently switched to a search-engine type presentation for information on stocks.

“We reorganized our entire research section around ways that customers do research, rather than around the ways we buy it,” Mr. Rubinstein says.

Waterhouse also recently added a unique feature – proprietary PrimeAccess research from New York’s Goldman Sachs Group Inc. – to its site.

Jupiter ranked 20 banking sites and 19 brokerage sites, with Scottrade Inc., finishing last overall among online brokerage companies.

Rodger Riney, Scottrade’s president and chief executive, says he finds his company’s ranking curious.

He notes that the St. Louis company was just ranked highest in investor satisfaction for online stock trading in J.D. Power & Associates’ twice-yearly survey.

“Our whole philosophy is really about the synergies of servicing an online account through a local branch office,” he says. “We’ve never changed that, nor are we changing that. It’s the way we’ve been building on the web for five years.”