A three-year trend of social driving traffic to websites has been reversed, according to a report from Shareaholic. It appears that Facebook’s recent troubles have played a hand in that reversal.
According to Shareaholic’s data, 35% of traffic to websites assessed in the survey came from search engines, while 26% of traffic came from social networks. The survey data came from over 400 million users and over a quarter of a million mobile and desktop sites visited by those users. The websites included verticals such as food, tech, design, fashion/beauty, marketing, sports, parenting, religion and general news.
A drop in referrals from Facebook is considered to be the biggest factor in the switch from social to search referrals. In the first half of 2016, Facebook accounted for 31% of website visits, but by the second half of 2017, the percentage of referrals from the social media platform dropped to 18%.
As might be expected, Google drove most of the search referrals by the second half of 2017 at 37%. This was an increase from just under 28% in the first half of 2016. The next largest search referral site was Bing, at less than 1% of referrals.