Referral Traffic Trends: Facebook Declines, Google Grows

In the back and forth battle for who reigns supreme for referral traffic, Google has once again taken over the lead from Facebook.

In July 2015 Facebook pulled ahead of Google as the top source of referral traffic(source Parse.ly). Facebook’s share of referral traffic grew to 38.3 percent vs. Google’s 35.8 percent.

However beginning in February of 2017 websites began experiencing a significant and steady decline of referral traffic from Facebook, while refferal traffic from Google begin to slightly increase.

After six months of steadily declining numbers, Facebook referral traffic is now down over 25%.

It is important to point out that the decrease in referral traffic from Facebook has not affected all publishers equally. Some have seen huge drops in traffic, while others have seen an increase in the same period.

Two-thirds of the publishers saw a decrease in referral traffic over this period while the remaining one-third saw an increase. For half, traffic decreased a substantial 20% or more, and for 20% of publishers, Facebook referral trafic was cut by 50% or more.

Facebook continues to tweak the algorithms it uses to govern what posts appear in their News Feed. It appears that Facebook is downgrading the chances of content from Businesses and Organizations from appearing in News Feeds… perhaps in an attempt to create more demand for its advertising business.

This topic is discussed(and confirmed) in a BriteWire blog post titled: How ‘Facebook Zero’ Will Impact Social Media Marketing.

Amazon #1, Google Drops To #2 In Product Searches

Amazon has become the top place consumers go on the Internet to search for products as Google continues to lose market share for e-commerce search.

Google – you blew it!

When you all but eliminated “products” from your organic search results to create demand for your paid placement “Google Shopping” monetization scheme you ceased to be a Search Engine. Instead, you became a Paid Placement Advertising Service. Your index of products available for purchase was reduced to those stores willing to pay you to inlcude their products in your Google Shopping product index.

Google Shopping is powered by two platforms: AdWords and Google Merchant Center. Google Merchant Center is where stores submit their product data feeds to. AdWords is where stores create Google Shopping Ads to promote the products in the Google Shopping product index. Only products submitted to Google Merchant Center and paid to be promoted via AdWords appear in the Google Shopping product index.

Google’s “pay to play” shopping scheme resulted in a small subset of products represented in their search results, and allowed Amazon to take a leadership position in Product Search. It also resulted in a $2.7BN fine for EU antitrust violations over Google shopping searches.

Fifty-five percent of people in the U.S. now start their online shopping trips on Amazon.com(source: BloomReach 2016 survey). That statistic marks a 25 percent increase from the same survey last year, when 44 percent of online shoppers said they turned to Amazon first. Over the same time, the percentage of shoppers who start product searches on search engines like Google dropped from 34 percent to 28 percent.

Amazon is exploiting Google’s “weakness” in online shopping, as shoppers are increasingly starting their product searches on Amazon instead of Google(source: Forrester Research Report 2017). According to the report, consumers are 2.5 times more likely to find out about the brand of a recent purchase from Amazon versus any other search. “This erosion is likely to continue” for Google, the report said.

According to a survey by the financial services firm Raymond James, more than half of people start their search for online shopping on Amazon now, while only 26% use search engines like Google as the starting point.

Perhaps what’s more concerning is that the search engine’s share has been cut in half compared to 2014, while Amazon’s share has significantly increased over the past two years.

And it doesn’t look like the trend will change any time soon. The prime 18 to 29 year age group prefers Amazon by a wide margin when it comes to online product searches, according to the survey.

Google AMP Is Not A Good Thing

Google’s AMP is bad. Google AMP is bad for how the web is built. Google AMP is bad for publishers. Google AMP is only good for one party: Google.

Do we really need Instant Articles (Facebook) and AMP (Google) when we can accomplish fast loading pages with plain, uncomplicated HTML and CSS?
Web developers can use simple HTML and CSS to make clear, fast loading pages. This does not require complicated tricks or techniques. The pages can still be made to be functional, and have good graphic design.

When AMP (Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages) first came out, I was optimistic. AMP’s aim was to make the web faster, and I am aligned with that goal.

What I dislike was the fact that Google was caching AMP content, and serving it from their own cache and under their own domain name. In other words, instead of serving the content from my websites, it is being served from Google.com.

This is a clever scheme to “trap” users on a Google owned ecosystem.

To entice developers and publishers to implement AMP, Google let it be known that AMP enabled websites would rank well in Google search results. To be clear, Google has officially stated that AMP support does not affect site’s search ranking… but they made it very clear that they will penalize websites that do not render fast on mobile devices. AMP enabled content will render fast on mobile devices. Therefore developers came to the conclusion that AMP enabled websites would be a good strategy for ranking well in Google’s search results.

Another search ranking benefit of AMP, is that only AMP enabled sites are shown in Google’s carousel feature. Getting featured there must be very important for big publishers.

Google’s AMP is bad. Google AMP is bad for how the web is built. Google AMP is bad for publishers. Google AMP is only good for one party: Google.