Do You Know Which Referral Source Drives the Most Traffic
As you may be aware, we collect a lot of data at Eightfold Logic, and have been doing so for a few years. Last week, I was looking at the lists of online marketers, and the voting numbers, and began to think about them in the context of traffic delivered, and its value. I had a broad sampling run from a swathe of web sites across industries and geographies to ascertain which channels deliver the most raw referral traffic. Later, in another post, I’ll dive into quality.
Sample size: 1 week of data, 36,164,959 unique referrals. (original sessions, excluding bots etc)
| Referral Source | |
|---|---|
| Search | 24.04% |
| Links | 16.64% |
| Social Media / Social Networking sites | 1.56% |
| Everything Else (including Direct) | 57.75% |
It’s amazing how much marketing attention is focused on social considering the volume of referrals it drives to businesses, relative to other customer acquisition channels. However, it’s understood that used effectively, social is more about the pre-site-visit experience, and market awareness. That said, very few organizations are using social media marketing effectively. Effectively harnessing this inbound marketing channel opportunity will be of paramount importance going forward for companies to survive and succeed.
Richard Zwicky - @rzwicky
Tags: Analytics, business decisions, search, search engine, search engine strategies, Search Engines, search referrals, SEM, SEO, SEO Link Building, Social Link Building Marketplace