New research by Boston-based Web traffic analysts Shareaholic finds that in 2017 search produced a larger share (34.8%) of visits to websites than did social media (25.6%), for the first time since 2014 .
Shareaholic analysts cite recent changes to Facebook's newsfeed algorithms - intended to exclude fake news and spam - as one cause of the decline in social media's referral share.
They found Google to be #1 referrer in 2017, with a 36.82% in 2H2017, up more than 7% yoy - while #1 social-media referrer Facebook's share declined by 12.7%.
In a separate report, Chartbeat content analysts found 2017 traffic from Google Search to AMP-enabled publishers to be up 100%, while that to publishers not using AMP to be flat .
In earlier research (see Related Article) NetApplications found Google's share of global search traffic in November 2017 to be 74.24% on desktop and 93.00% on mobile.
Google is #1 referrer to all the sites we manage. Do you get more referrals from some other site? If so, let's discuss - maybe you've discovered some primo strategy I don't know about. I'd be interesting in hearing about that.
- David
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