Sports website traffic sources – social vs search
Google is still the number one source of external traffic for major news and sports websites but social media is quickly eating away at their margin. Facebook and Twitter still have a long way to come but their growth rates as important traffic sources over the past 12 months are very impressive and of significant concern to Google. Heading off the growth of Facebook is one of the top priorities for Eric Schmidt in 2011 and he has aligned the year-end bonuses of his senior executives with success in the social space.
Earlier today Outbrain published the results of a study covering 100 million sessions on leading news and media websites. The data and growth rates for traffic sources on these sites are similar to the data that ManagedSEO has been collecting over the same period for some of the world’s most popular major sports websites. Sports websites typically have higher loyalty and rely less on social media for traffic so the total percentages are lower than the content sites in this study but the growth rates are very similar.
In February 2010 when I worked as the Director of Internet Services for the Vancouver 2010 Olympics we successfully generated a record breaking 291 million monthly visits to Vancouver2010.com. Over 65% (191 million visits) of these visits came from search engines and our SEO success made us the top sports website in the world during the Games. Despite our significant social media activations and a Facebook community of over 1.3 million fans we still only generated 1.5% of our traffic from social media. Since the Vancouver 2010 Olympics (13 months ago) the share of social media on major sports portals has more than doubled from under 2% to over 4% in March 2011. The return on investment in terms of traffic acquisition from a well executed SEO strategy and tactics is still much greater than that of investments in social media. That said, the growth rate and importance of social can not be underestimated and it may be a different story in 2012.
The study from Outbrain looked at traffic from 100 million sessions in the first quarter of this year. They found that search drove 41% of external traffic, with other content sites (31%), portals (17%) and social media (11%) coming behind. The numbers across over 20 million monthly visits to leading sports portals in March 2011 showed 56% of visits from search, 23% from other content sites, 17% from portals and 4% from social media. Not surprisingly, Google is the primary source of referral traffic to the sites monitored by Outbrain’s applications, responsible for directing almost nine times more traffic than the average site referrer. AOL’s homepage surpassed Yahoo and Facebook for the number two spot.
This study also confirms that social traffic is still of lower quality than search traffic. This is also consistent with our data for March 2011 where Facebook traffic to leading sports websites typically generated only 75% of the page views compared to visits originating from search. Twitter traffic was even lower quality and generated only about 45% of the page views per visit compared to Google. Outbrain also measured engagement via bounce rates and “hyper engaged readership” (readers who view more than five pages in a session). In both of those cases, Content Sites topped the charts with the lowest bounce rates, most engaged readers. Search was a close second. Social media traffic created the highest bounce rate per session in the study. It was very interesting to compare the Managed SEO Sports data to the data of Outbrain especially considering their data is made up primarily of News and entertainment sites. The full Outbrain study is available on their blog.
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