Search engines are major external traffic drivers for social media giant Facebook’s Pages – This was the finding of a study conducted by PageLever, an analytics tool. The traffic driven to Facebook pages by search engines amounts to 34% of all external referrals. Interestingly, of all the search engines, Google sent the most volume of all external traffic to Facebook pages – 27.5%.
PageLever’s study analyzed 1000 pages, with a minimum of 10,000 fans each. In a surprising twist, Yahoo! surpasses Bing in sending traffic to Facebook pages, in a bid to gain more social experience, search engine Bing has teamed up with Facebook. Google’s score in the matter is 10x higher than Bing’s.
Google owned video-sharing service, YouTube also beat Bing at the game. YouTube also had the highest differential between the mean and median. This could be due to the overall lack of YouTube presence in some companies or the lack of Facebook URLs posted within the videos.
The full statistical report is as below:
As is obvious from the table , the median is significantly lower than the mean for the search engines. This could mean that a few pages get a much higher percentage of traffic from search engines, thereby raising the average for the entire sample. Pages that rank in search are seeing a significant raise in referrals, whereas more pages fall under the search referrals mean.
Jeff Widman, co-founder of PageLever derived this data from Facebook by analyzing the top external traffic referrers from the Facebook API across a six month time-span (Jan-June) in 2011.
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Google sends close to 1/3 of the external referrer traffic for these pages.
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Google sends 10x more traffic than Bing.
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Yahoo sends more traffic than Bing.
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Optimizing for SEO seems to have paid off for several of these Fan Pages.
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YouTube is a key source of traffic for just a few pages. This is clear from the high average but the low median.
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Some of these pages are getting pretty much zero traffic from search engines.
The standard deviations are quite large, implying that there’s a lot of variance between the different fan pages.
Widman employed the following methodology for his study:
The study used the raw data from Facebook, which reports the top external traffic referrers for Fan pages through their API.
Analytics tool PageLever was used to measure the number of referrals from domains with the words ‘Google’, ‘Bing’, ‘Yahoo’ and ‘YouTube.’
Widman measured the percentage of external referral sources that came from each search engine for each day from January 1 to January 30, 2011. He then calculated the average across the entire data to generate per-page average for each traffic source.
He analyzed 1,000 fan pages with at least 10,000 fans to ensure that there was enough pageview data for each page. Over half-a-billion fans aggregate across these 1000 pages. The 1,000 per-page-per-search engine averages were taken and averaged together to get an average across the entire sample.
Widman has a word of caution in the way the results are interpreted. He clarifies that the findings do not mean that 27% of pageviews come from Google. What it means is that 27% or external referrals come from Google.
Facebook reports both users coming from elsewhere within Facebook and pageviews from external referral sources and the findings refer to search-engine percentages of total external referrals.