Tag Archives: referral traffic

Google’s Replacing Facebook as Top Referrer to Publishers

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Source: Statista

Facebook hasn’t made many friends among publishers lately. The company’s announcement, it would de-prioritise publishing content in its algorithm had many in the industry up in arms. However, there are signs that the drop in referral traffic from Facebook is offset by traffic gains coming from Google searches, especially in the mobile section.

Research by Chartbeat indicates that this phenomenon isn’t all that new. The below infographic shows that Google mobile searches have closed in and overtaken mobile referral traffic from Facebook from August last year onwards.

This is probably linked to the fact that “more publishers have been signing up for the Google publishing format launched in 2015 known as Accelerated Mobile Pages,” according to Recode. The AMP service hosts publishers’ content on Google servers, which reduces loading time for mobile users.

The good news for the publishing industry is that Facebook referral traffic losses can be compensated. The bad news is that this doesn’t solve the overall problem of dependency on platforms. It might make publishers even more dependent on just one player.

Social Network Infographic

Referral Traffic – Google or Facebook?

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Source: statista.com

It’s a common conception that everybody finds everything online via a Google search. According to research by Parse.ly, though, this is actually far from the case. All told, the lion’s share of referral traffic comes from Facebook (although it should be noted that Google AMP is not included in the analysis).

Where the picture becomes a little less clear is when we break down the referrals by topic. Lifestyle page referrals, for example, are dominated by Facebook (87 percent) whereas people generally find job postings through Google Search (84 percent).

Facebook itself came under fire during and after the U.S. presidential election for allowing so-called fake news to circulate freely on its site. With 59 percent of referrals to pages on this topic in 2016 coming from the social network, the political power of Mark Zuckerberg’s company is clear to see.

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