Last year, for the first time since 2014, search generated more referral traffic than social media. This was revealed in a new referral traffic report from Shareaholic, which analyses traffic referrals from more than 400 million users to roughly 250,000 sites across a diverse range of industries. Similar findings have been published by Chartbeat too.
This is a significant development for brands and marketing managers – one that’s likely to get a lot of coverage in the industry. But it’s important to try and put findings like this into context before you make any changes to your marketing strategy.
Search generates more traffic than social media
As Shareaholic rightly says in its report, “As traffic patterns change, so should your search and social strategies.” According to its findings, search generated 34.8% of site visits in 2017 compared to 25.6% from social media – you can see how the share of traffic referrals has changed over the last few years above.
Shareaholic isn’t the only content promotion company reporting an uptake in referrals from search. Chartbeat also says it has seen an increase in traffic from Google Search while numbers from Facebook move in the other direction.
However, Chartbeat goes a little further with its analysis and compares desktop traffic to mobile, revealing that the increase in search traffic is largely coming from mobile.
Finally, Chartbeat looked at AMP traffic vs referrals from non-AMP content:
“We then looked specifically at Mobile Google Search to compare sites that are using AMP versus those that are not. The difference was stark. While Mobile Google Search traffic to our AMP-enabled publishers is up 100% over the same timeframe, traffic to publishers not using AMP is flat.”
What does this mean for marketers?
Well, the findings from Shareaholic and Chartbeat are obviously…
