Measuring and analysing visitor traffic to a website is important in understanding what motivates those visitors and knowing how they get to a website and where they came from is an important metric that is used to build better website content that ultimately results in better conversion rates.
Peter Bowen at First One On says “we are seeing increasing numbers of visitors coming from social media platforms and Google’s changing algorithm is placing more emphasis on websites that can attract visitors from sources other than a search using their search engine”.
So the question this week is to ask yourself is – “how well are you doing with search results that come from Google?” and “what are you doing to attract visitors from social media platforms?”
As we all know, social media is about people and people share information that they find and as the old adage says “the best referral is word of mouth” and in this case it is the sharing of knowledge and great content and social media is gaining ground against search engines in its ability to deliver increasingly more traffic to websites over traditional search engines.
UK Experian Hitwise Data noted that UK visits to major search engines dropped by 100 million through the month of August 2012 to 2.21 billion, and has dropped by 40 million year-over-year. Peter Bowen says, “the key thing here is the growing significance of social networks as a source of traffic to websites” and “search is still the number-one source of traffic, but social networks are growing as people increasingly navigate around the web via recommendations from Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc.”
This is great news for Facebook should it launch its own search engine and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said “we’re basically doing 1 billion queries a day and we’re not even trying,” adding that “Facebook is pretty uniquely positioned to answer the questions people have. At some point we’ll do it. We have a team working on it,” and “Search engines are really evolving to give you a set of answers, I have a specific question, answer this question for me.”
A recent survey from Greenlight Digital suggested that a Facebook search engine could instantly grab 22% of the market share.
According to recent research from Webmarketing123, the number of marketers able to attribute leads and sales to particular social channels more than doubled (leads from 15 to 31%, sales from 23% to 60%) year-over-year.
“Compared to last year, nearly 50% more B2Bs now identify social media as having the most impact on lead generation (2011 vs 2012),” the firm said in its report.
In social media engagement, the firm says, “B2C marketers are ahead with 70% moderately to highly engaged (40% highly engaged), but B2B is catching up, with 63% at those levels of engagement (27% highly engaged), overall, only 1 in 10 have no social media program.”
90% of B2Bs have some level of Social Media engagement, according to the research, with 63% describing themselves as “moderately to fully engaged,” and 25% “very” to “fully” engaged. The majority of this group, Webmarketing123 says, are seeing a return on their investment. Top areas of investment (for the 60% that spend) are Facebook & LinkedIn (where 40% are active), and Twitter (30%).
Other research from RichRelevance indicates that for ecommerce, Pinterest is increasing in terms of traffic value (specifically average order value).
Webmarketing123 says that 20% of the marketers active on social media aren’t sure if they’re generating leads, and a full 40% aren’t sure if they’ve closed sales attributable to social media.
