Source: Shareaholic
Notes: Facebook continues to cement its position as the leading social referrer of website traffic, referring a new high of 23.4% share of traffic to Shareaholic’s network of publishers in June, up from 9.3% share in June 2013, although the sample set used is continuously expanding, which may influence the longitudinal trends. While Pinterest has emerged as a solid second, its share of referral traffic declined during Q2, from 7.1% share in March to 5.7% in June. Meanwhile, Twitter continues to hover around the 1% share mark, which remains more than the combination of StumbleUpon (0.6%), Reddit (0.2%), YouTube (0.06%), Google+ (0.06%) and LinkedIn (0.02%). It should be noted that Shareaholic sees social as referring roughly 35% share of traffic – and search is likely somewhere around that figure, given this report. That leaves little room for direct traffic and paid search traffic. Reached for comment, Shareaholic notes that it is working on an upcoming report examining traffic share from other referral sources. Asked about the composition of its publisher network (besides what is noted below), Shareaholic responded that: “We use publishers as an umbrella term for the websites within our network because we originally grew by supporting blogs and online publications looking to drive more traffic. Since then our network has expanded to support sites in dozens of head categories and sectors including ecommerce, niche forums, and professional services.”
Related: Which Social Sites Refer the Most Engaged Visitors?
About the Data: Shareaholic describes its methodology as follows:
“Shareaholic sources data from a network of opt-in websites that utilize its content marketing and publishing tools. Our sites are fairly diverse, spread across tens of different head categories (e.g. food, tech, design, fashion and beauty, marketing, sports, parenting, religion, general news, and many, many more), with sites ranging from independent lifestyle blogs to publishing companies to commerce sites. Furthermore, the size of websites participating in this study varies. Some receive less than 1,000 unique visitors each month while others pull in millions.
Our methodology is unique in that we utilize a proprietary network of opt-in websites that continues to grow. Rather than working solely with a static list, we take advantage of an expanding data set which is why our sample size for Q2 (300k+ sites reaching 400M+ users) is larger than that for our year-over-year analysis (200k+ sites reaching 250M+ users).”
