Social media is the fastest growing source of e-commerce traffic
Cooper Smith | April 29, 2015
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In absolute terms, social media isn't a huge driver of e-commerce traffic, but that's quickly changing. In fact, social media is the fastest growing source of traffic for online shopping sites (mobile and desktop) at a time when search's share of total referrals is shrinking, according to data sent to us by MarketLive.
- Social traffic to e-commerce sites is growing far faster than other referral channels. Social media increased its share of e-commerce referrals nearly 200% between the first quarters of 2014 and 2015. Roughly 2% of all e-commerce traffic in the US now stems from social networks such as Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter.
- Search — particularly paid search — is seeing its share of referrals shrink. Paid search's share of online shopping traffic declined 20% year-over-year (YoY) and now accounts for just 16% of total e-commerce traffic. Meanwhile,organic search's share of traffic declined 8% YoY and now accounts for 34% of total e-commerce traffic.
- Referral traffic from email remains fairly consistent. Email's share of online shopping traffic declined slightly YoY, and still accounts for roughly 13% of all e-commerce traffic on desktop and mobile in the US.
The data suggests that consumers are increasingly exhibiting shopping behavior on social networks. As a result, brands and retailers should be allocating a larger share of their marketing resources to social platforms like Facebook.
It's also important to note that a greater and increasing share of e-commerce traffic is coming from direct site visits. This suggests that shoppers are becoming increasingly loyal to particular e-commerce sites. So consumers are relying less on search and more on their past experiences to decide which shopping sites they visit.
