Facebook Referral Traffic Declines: Pinterest, Google & Instagram Gain Ground

This post was most recently updated on August 23rd, 2019

Find out how traffic sources for publishers have shifted now that Facebook has updated their news feed policies. Sources such as Pinterest, Instagram and search engine traffic from Google have gained much ground. In this week’s social video we take a look at some insightful statistics from a traffic report from Shareaholic and show you which traffic sources are key to success in 2018.

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Video transcription

A traffic report from Shareaholic indicated that the share of visits for Facebook fell 8% during 2017.

The report is made up of data from over 250 000 websites’ referral traffic data.

Share of visits represents the percentage of overall traffic from direct & social referrals, organic search, and paid search.

During the 2nd part of 2016 and the first half of 2017, the share of visits for Facebook dropped 12.7%.

Other social networks such as Pinterest & Instagram, as well as search engine traffic from Google, benefited from the decline.

According to the report, search engine traffic took the lead during 2017 by gaining 34.8% of visits while social only drove 25.6%.

Google gained most ground from the decline in social traffic reclaiming its position as #1 referral traffic source.

For the category of search engine traffic the following search engines drove the most traffic:

#1 – Google

#2 – Bing

#3 – Yahoo

#4 – DuckDuck Go

#5 – Aol

Not only did Google benefit, but Pinterest and Instagram also gained ground.

During this period Pinterest focused on sharing content from their platform on other sites and grew their share of visits at a rate of 1.5% – more than double other social networks.

Pinterest currently has 200 million monthly users and over 100 billions pins saved on its site.

This makes it a great medium for driving traffic to websites. Content shared is also growing at an exponential rate.

Out of the 2 million monthly searches Pinterest receives, 85% comes from mobile with 75% of new users from countries other than the United States.

Part of the decline in traffic from Facebook comes from policy changes they made to their newsfeed in reducing page content.

Facebook users are also increasingly spending time on video within the platform, which does not always lead to traffic for external websites.

Other websites that also profited included YouTube, LinkedIn & Flipboard.

LinkedIn released a new desktop website design while Flipboard started allowing publishers to add their RSS feeds to the platform.

These social networking sites once again prove themselves as useful traffic machines for publisher websites.

Even if some, such as Facebook, is on the decline, there are still many platforms to implement within your website traffic strategy.

Source: https://blog.shareaholic.com/search-engine-social-media-traffic-trends-report-2017

Source: https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/315004/facebook-declines-in-referral-traffic-google-pin.html

Source: https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/314979/pinterest-search-driving-higher-social-ad-investme.html

Kean Graham

Kean Graham is the CEO and founder of MonetizeMore & a pioneer in the Adtech Industry. He is the resident expert in Ad Optimization, covering areas like Adsense Optimization,GAM Management, and third-party ad network partnerships. Kean believes in the supremacy of direct publisher deals and holistic optimization as keys to effective and consistent ad revenue increases.