Is Facebook and Twitter Referral Traffic Wildly Overhyped?

There was an interesting (and grossly underreported) bit of referral traffic data posted by ad network Chitika about a month ago.

Chitika looked at referral data for more than 120M impressions across 60,000 sites and concluded that Search remains the undisputed king of traffic referrals - and it's not close:

According to Chitika, search accounts for all but a rounding error of referral traffic.  Social (sites like Facebook, StumbleUpon, and Twitter) are growing as a referral segment, but accounted for only 0.55% of referrals in September.  Twitter referrals actually fell, leading Chitika to suggest that "Twitter users appear to be becoming link-blind."

Another interesting tidbit is that after a buzzy launch, Bing is starting to slip as a referrer.

So let's digest this.  Search represents nearly 98% of all referral traffic and its share is growing.  Twitter referrals are tiny and getting tinier.  Bing is slipping.  StumbleUpon is the top social site referrer.

Does anyone else see a disconnect between the hype and the data?

I've heard reports of early adopter focused sites whose social referral traffic has started to matter.  But it certainly doesn't seem to be a mainstream phenomenon.

So the implications of this in no particular order:

- All bow down to the Google God
- Think hard about committing resources to social optimization over search optimization
- Don't let Silicon Valley's love affair with social media fool you: search is showing no signs of getting dethroned any time soon.
- Flat traffic and eroding referral share are troubling signs for Twitter

Thanks to Chitika for exposing this fascinating data. 

Note: One possible explanation for why this data might be skewed in favor of search - sites that use Chitika might be more search friendly than social friendly, due to this product.

Comments

[Frank Lynch]

Thanks for this great informative post. To be successful online these days you have to be on top of everything - the search engines, social networking sites, SEO, exchange links etc. I learned a lot from your post.

[Rick Porter]

Thanks - great post. I'm using everything for traffic and know that some things will sink while others swim. We are still in the infancy of the internet when you look at the big picture and how far we have come in so little time. Hard to imagine even 5 years from now at the going rate of ideas and technology.

[Eric]

Thank for nice info. I take advantage from this

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