Facebook beats Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube and StumbleUpon for referral traffic

Facebook has increased the traffic it refers to other websites year-on-year, according to recent StatCounter figures, despite reports of the social media giant’s demise. The report measured the number of times a social media website referred a visitor to a website featuring StatCounter’s analytics code. According to the report, around 3 million websites use the […]

Andrew Sadauskas 12 July, 2013

Facebook has increased the traffic it refers to other websites year-on-year, according to recent StatCounter figures, despite reports of the social media giant’s demise.

The report measured the number of times a social media website referred a visitor to a website featuring StatCounter’s analytics code. According to the report, around 3 million websites use the code with a total average of around 15 billion page views each day.

“We measure the referral influence of social media sites by analysing every page view referred by a social media site. ‘Referral influence’ is a measure of the amount of referral traffic generated by a social media site. The more referral traffic from a social media site, the higher it will rank in our Global Stats data,” the report states.

The figures show Facebook accounted for 71.03% of all traffic referrals from a social media website during June 2013 to 71.03%, up from 61.5% a year earlier.

Facebook was also the market leader in terms of referral traffic in the US, increased from 46.11% to 51.97%, and the UK, where its share grew to 62.23% from 59.62%.

Pinterest now claims second spot for referral traffic, increasingly slightly from 8.5% a year ago to 8.76%.

Twitter claims third place, generating 6.54% of all referral traffic on the internet, up from 6.13% a year earlier.

The biggest loser is StumbleUpon, which has seen its share crash from 9.16% to 4.67%.

YouTube also suffered a decline, from 9.8% to 4.36%, although StatCounter notes this is largely due to YouTube’s content.

“YouTube’s ratings from month to month can vary significantly. This is because YouTube is a social media site on which content is generally directly consumed rather than being a medium for the sharing of links to third party sites,” StatCounter states.

As SmartCompany recently reported, recent figures compared video sharing websites show Google (including YouTube) was the market leader during May, securing 154.5 million viewers, ahead of Facebook (60 million), AOL (53 million), VEVO (52 million), NDN (46 million), Microsoft (45 million), Viacom (43 million), Yahoo! (43 million), Amazon (33 million) and Turner Digital (32 million).