Google was not the primary source of referred internet traffic in 2016 and a large part of this year as well. The top referrer was another internet giant which does not specialise in search
Google (v.)—To search for information about (someone or something) on the internet using the search engine Google.
Searching on the internet is so eponymous to Google that the word Google became a verb way back in 2006 when Oxford dictionary included it in its collection of words. Today, perceptively, it is assumed that almost everybody finds everything online through a Google search, given the market share it enjoys (in some countries like Brazil and India, as high as 95 percent). However, the perception may be slowly changing.
Apparently, there is one platform which people use as extensively as Google Search to find something on the internet and sometimes more — Facebook.
Riding on the back of its almost two billion users, Facebook dominated the referral traffic on the internet in 2016. The social media giant referred 40 percent of the traffic on the internet as against Google Search’s 37 percent, according to a study conducted by Parse.ly - a technology firm that provides web analytics and content optimisation software for online publishers. One should note that this survey did not include Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) data.
Referral traffic indicates the traffic generated by virtue of links of millions of articles, news and text content appearing on other websites, including search engines.
A breakdown of referrals by topic gives a clearer picture. People use Google search engine for jobs and technology, whereas resort to Facebook when looking for lifestyle, local events and entertainment stories. At one extreme, 84 percent people used Google Search to look for job postings, on the other, 87 percent people used Facebook for lifestyle content.
Facebook also dominated when it came to content related to education and research and local crime and other related incidents. It also had a decent share in topics related to state and local politics, world economy and national security for the year 2016.On the other hand, Google search dominated Sports and Business content with 50 and 47 percent share, respectively. Twitter also had a significant share of the traffic for sports content with a pie of 10 percent.
Especially, Facebook’s decisive role in US Presidential election 2016 is evident from the way it dominated the referral traffic last year. A whopping 60 percent people used Facebook to land on content related to the US presidential election, compared to 25 percent from Google search and 4 percent each from Google News and Twitter.
Lately, Facebook has come under fire for allowing so-called fake news as well as Russian propaganda to circulate freely on its site during and after the US presidential elections 2016.
Parse.ly analysed the traffic landing on 1 million web pages of over 1,000 websites which generated over 14 billion page views from January 2016 to December 2016. The study considered only that content which was in English and was greater than 600 characters.
Trend in 2017
The 2017 data (till October-November) for external referral traffic analysed by Parse.ly sees a gradual change in the trend. In real time, Google Search is the top external referrer with 43 percent against Facebook’s 27 percent of the internet traffic under study.
The trend started to change after June when Google search leapfrogged Facebook as the top referrer. If the graph curves do not make any abrupt change for the remaining part of the year, Google search may eventually emerge as the top referrer for 2017.
Nevertheless, the 2016 data is reason enough for digital marketers of businesses and publishers around the world to make changes to their strategy to focus more on Facebook aside from just Google.
