Only 2% of traffic to retailers during the holiday season came from social networks, per figures released by Adobe Systems. Analyzing billions of visits to nearly 500 retail websites during the holiday season, the study shows that direct traffic accounted for a plurality 40% of site visits, while roughly one-third of visits were search-driven. On a year-over-year basis, the share represented by direct and social traffic increased, while search’s share dropped slightly.
Adobe isn’t the first to detail social media’s rather small influence over the holiday season. According to a report from Baynote, Pinterest and Twitter influenced online and in-store purchases for just 1 in 10 shoppers surveyed, with Facebook garnering only slightly more interest. Meanwhile, IBM found that on Cyber Monday, the biggest online shopping day ever, social media sites referred just 0.8% of e-commerce site traffic and accounted for only 0.4% of sales.
Mobile devices, on the other hand, had more of an influence on the holiday season. In other results from its holiday recap, Adobe details the rise in mobile’s share of visits, which grew to 19% during the season. 10% was smartphone traffic, 8% tablet traffic, and the remaining 1% came from other mobile devices. As a result of boasting an average conversion rate 3 times higher than smartphones (2.4% vs. 0.8%), tablet traffic generated the majority of mobile sales during the period.
