• by April 14, 2005

It's that time again. Tax time.

Traffic to online tax information and prep sites is spiking. In fact, 68 percent of people have either filed their taxes online or are still planning to do so, according to a study conducted by Claria's Feedback Research unit.

The research arm of the adware company analyzed the online behavior of Claria users and found that the official Internal Revenue Service site was viewed by 69 percent of survey respondents. The IRS Web site had 51.7 percent of total traffic to the taxes category during the research period, followed by Intuit.com with 18 percent, and Turbotax.com with 15 percent of traffic, according to Claria's Feedback unit.

Other findings:

- 61 percent of respondents not using an outside service or accountant, plan on using or have used an online tax preparation site to prepare taxes; that's up 10 points versus last year.

- 31 percent of taxpayers will be using tax preparation software for the first time this year (up +3 points versus last year), while 69 percent indicated that they have used tax software to do their taxes before. Of those, 51 percent have used tax software for three years or more.

- Of those respondents who viewed or planned on viewing a tax-related site, 45 percent were doing so to find out the status of their refund.

- 43 percent viewed or planned on viewing a tax-related site to download/print tax forms.

During the last week leading up to the tax filing deadline:

- Taxcut.com and TurboTax.com both saw an 84 percent increase in traffic.

- HRBlock.com saw a 74 percent increase in traffic.

- IRS.gov saw a 66 percent increase in traffic.

Feedback Research ran the study from February 1, 2005 to April 8, 2005 among users who viewed tax-related Web sites. It also surveyed a random sampling of Claria users to gauge interest and activity around tax-related services.