Google may be identical with web traffic to many people, but Facebook refers more traffic to news sites, according to recent data from web traffic analytics firm Parse.ly.
In its periodical Report, Parse.ly looked at referral traffic to the 100 top news sites, as ranked by ComScore and Alexa. From May through July, 43 percent of the referral traffic came from social media sites and only 38 percent from Google or other search engines. Including regional Google search engines like Google.ca and Google News and Facebook accounted for nearly three-quarters of that. By evaluation, Yahoo and Twitter, numbers three and four, made up a combined total of 9.3 percent of the referral traffic.
Although Google usually made up the lion's share of the referral traffic, the search giant pointed in the fall of 2013, when Facebook progressively started to raise. Other than a brief immerse around October, the search giant has always been leading, until last quarter. Facebook's referral traffic share is stronger than it's ever been, making up 38.3 percent, to Google's 35.8 percent.
According to Andrew Montalenti, co-founder and CTO (Chief technology Officer) of Parse.ly "The search giant - Google is not a slouch of a referrer. It's still very close to Facebook as a proprietor of traffic and as you can observe, the next referrers are miles away from Facebook and Google as a couple, so it's not like this is a huge architectural shift for Facebook,".
Chief technology officer of Parse.ly, Andrew Montalenti refers to a movement he's seeing of news finding you, rather than you searching for information. With that in mind, he thinks publishers have been alert on social content more than Search Engine Optimization, and Facebook was there to exploit on that and work with publishers, rather than just treat it like any other website.
In October, the search giant executive chairman Eric Schmidt said the company's biggest contest is Amazon, not other search engines like Yahoo and Bing. But fresh research points out that the Google's most ferocious competitor is actually Facebook.
Last month, one of the top cloud-based marketing solutions IgnitionOne found that Facebook's display growth is up 48 percent year-over-year, whereas Google's is down 9 percent. Facebook is also a frightening opponent to YouTube; not even a year after making its algorithm more video-friendly, the social media powerhouse reached more than 4 billion video views in daily basis.
"I think Facebook executed Google's playbook in its own vertical-focused method, in social. We sort of saw, pre-initial public offering, it was all about user expansion and attainment. Post IPO, it was about rotating on the income search engine and paid traffic," Andrew says. "For a long time, Google had a trench built around search and built up its position around its potency in search. Search is this very powerful thing, but I think its realizing that social media is also a really prevailing thing that has something search doesn't."
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Article Courtesy: SearchEngineWatch.Com
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