Pinterest Beats Twitter, StumbleUpon & Bing For Referral Traffic
(UPDATED) As Pinterest continues to grow, more and more brands and businesses are paying attention – and for good reason. The online sharing service Shareaholic recently released data showing that Pinterest moved ahead of Twitter, StumbleUpon, and Bing in referral traffic to websites during the month of June, with 1.19% of referrals compared to Bing’s 1.09%, StumbleUpon’s .96%, and Twitter’s 0.92%.
Below is the summary of data collected from January through May by Shareaholic, which is being pulled from 200,000+ websites using the company’s sharing widget (first shared on MediaBistro).
Click to enlarge:
It's interesting to witness exactly how much more referral traffic Facebook gets each month when compared to Bing and Yahoo. Of course, Google is on another level entirely with its referral traffic. Twitter, while slowly working its way up, appears to still have a long way to go if they want to catch up to Facebook.
But just take a look the chart below, which shows a six-month trend of traffic sources coming from Pinterest, Twittter, Bing, StumbleUpon, and Google referral (which is traffic that comes from Google and isn’t an organic search, such as AdWords or Google+). Notice the rapid rise in referrals from Pinterest during the month of June (the red line).
Click to enlarge:
Clearly the trend is upward for Pinterest, but this could nothing more than a short-lived bump. It is important to note that in all other months since February, Pinterest finished last in referral traffic when compared to Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Bing, StumbleUpon and Twitter.
However, these most recent numbers could be indicative that Pinterest is beginning to entice a new and wider audience. We’ll have to wait and see how the trend plays out over the next several months.
—
Hisham Dahud is a Senior Analyst for Hypebot.com. Additionally, he is the head of Business Development for Fame House, LLC and an independent musician. Follow him on Twitter: @HishamDahud
HIsham –
Shareaholic’s business structure is one that replies upon bloggers, and provides them a sharing widget/plugin. Given that one of the hottest blog-growth sectors is still the mommy-blogger, and coincidentally, mommy bloggers are also the largest user base on Pinterest – this data is inherently flawed, and does not present a true picture.
Also of note is that within this timeframe, Shareaholic also released a new “recommendations” tool for bloggers, specifically to increase user time-on-site for the bloggers.
again, given the nature of bloggers and usage, i’d assume here that this launch also played into the growth, creating a blog-pinterest-blog-pinterest loop cycle.
There have been a couple of sharing-plugin companies that have released data like this in the past few months, and when you more closely examine the user bases for the companies pre-existing, you can easily assess that the data, as presented, is nothing more than link-bating. As is this headline.
No Hypebot hater here…but agree that the Shareaholic data is inherently flawed.
Two notes: 1) Different social media outlets skew obviously to different demographic traffic 2) The key thing to figure out is which audience is engaged and takes actions. Awareness was already built at the outlet (Pintrest, Twitter, whatever) — so actions downstream is a more valuable metric.
Matthew
Thrillcall
Getapp.thrillcall.com
I’m sorry, but I STILL don’t know any guys who use Pinterest. It may be growing, but there still only focused on about half the population.
I’m sorry, but I STILL don’t know any guys who use Pinterest. It may be growing, but it’s still only focused on about half the population.
Thanks Bob,as always you have added food for thought with a different perspective on connecting with fans.