Tuesday, June 8, 2010
UK Social Network Traffic Overtakes Search Engine Visits
A big day: Experian Hitwise announced that social networks attracted more UK online traffic than search engines in May 2010. Since May of last year, social network visits have climbed from about 10% of all UK site visits to 11.88% of the total. During the same time, traffic to search engines fell from about 12% to 11.33% of all visits.
Google UK remained the most popular site overall among UK Web users, representing more than 90% of searches in May, said Hitwise. But Facebook ranked second in popularity, and accounted for 55% of all UK traffic to social network sites. YouTube claimed 16.5% of social network traffic, and Twitter placed third, with just over 2%.
These Hitwise results bear out some of the first rankings from the recently launched UK Online Measurement company (UKOM), which bases its audience estimates on Nielsen panel data. UKOM found that Google was indeed the top Web brand in April 2010, attracting 35.3 million unique visitors. The combined audience of Microsoft’s MSN, Windows Live and Bing search engine registered 28.3 million users, ahead of Facebook with 25 million.
These audience figures go some way to explaining why Facebook is also being widely credited with saving the display ad industry virtually single-handed. According to comScore’s Ad Metrix, the leading social network delivered almost 21 million display impressions to UK Web users in March 2010. That was more than 30% of all display ads served that month, comScore reported.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by eMarketer, Liz Cable, Delia MacNamara, Claudio Vaccaro, Hamann and others. Hamann said: impressive. Social media traffic now larger than search in UK. 12% of all traffic. http://bit.ly/9VFXxh [...]
[...] UK Social Network Traffic Overtakes Search Engine Visits – The …11 hours ago by Karin von Abrams Experian Hitwise reports that UK traffic to social networks overtook search engine traffic for the first time in May 2010. [...]
[...] UK Social Network Traffic Overtakes Search Engine Visits – The …8 Jun 2010 by Karin von Abrams Experian Hitwise reports that UK traffic to social networks overtook search engine traffic for the first time in May 2010. [...]
[...] Facebook now ranked as the top site in the world in terms of Ad impressions and the fact that people now spend more hours on Facebook than they do on Google, then having a corporate presence on Facebook is becoming more and more of a brand necessity. [...]
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by SEO & SEM Tips, AinTec España. AinTec España said: http://bit.ly/aXM4NB by @emarketer UK Social Network Traffic Overtakes Search Engine Visits * #socialmedia #web #buscadores [...]
[...] have been a flop – Facebook actually grew by 5.5m users in May 2010, and social media as a whole overtook search engines as the main destination for UK web users – but the concessions made by the company will have [...]