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Pedro Gonçalves

Where Did All The Search Traffic Go - 0 views

www.buzzfeed.com/...-did-all-the-search-traffic-go

Web Search SEO Referrals Social Media Content Strategy

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 02 May 13 - No Cached
  • Search traffic to publishers has taken a dive in the last eight months, with traffic from Google dropping more than 30% from August 2012 through March 2013, according to research done by BuzzFeed. While Google makes up the bulk of search traffic to publishers, traffic from all search engines has dropped by 20% in the same period.
  • Of the three major search engines — Google, Yahoo and Bing — only Yahoo saw growth in this period. While Yahoo grew search traffic in this period, it sent 21M referrals to publishers in March, less than half of the 48M referrals sent by Google. Traffic from Bing dropped 12%.
  • In the past, we've reported how referrals from social platforms like Facebook to the BuzzFeed Network were growing, and at times sending more traffic than search. While that difference was at times marginal — 5 to 10M referrals — its now sustained and significant. In March, Facebook sent 1.5x more traffic than Google, the greatest difference we've ever measured between the platforms. At the same time, we've watched traffic from other social platforms — Twitter and Pinterest -—continue to grow an audience and drive traffic traffic to publishers. "Dark social," that netherland of direct traffic, is also accelerating on the network, growing referral traffic to publishers by 52% over the past twelve months. By comparison, referrals from social platforms, i.e. the Facebooks, Twitters, Pinterests and Reddits of the world, grew by 25%. It begs the question, could direct traffic be taking the place of search?
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  • user behavior is changing, and we are seeing a shift in the way readers discover their content.
  • We know that most of direct/dark social traffic is from mobile and apps. Could it be that social apps that aggregate content like Pulse or Flipboard are growing in importance?
  • When SEO was king, publishers sought to program their content to be discovered by Google. Now that content requires human muscle to be shared on social platforms, publishers need to expend a different kind of energy focused on creating content that's emotional, funny and discoverable — i.e. the stuff you might want to share. And this may be what's killing search traffic too.
Pedro Gonçalves

The Emergence of the DarkNet and Why It Matters for Marketers | Huge - 0 views

hugeinc.com/...t-and-why-it-matters-marketers

Remarketing Web Internet Privacy Millennials Dark Search Dark Social

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 11 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • advertising technology called remarketing has proven alienating to online consumers. Remarketing, which lets advertisers follow someone around the Internet with a display ad, based on a previous search engine query, specific site visit, or other online action by the user, has increased in popularity in recent years.
  • The rapid spread of SnapChat--the picture sharing app that auto-deletes photos after ten seconds--shows that young people increasingly understand the need to keep some things secret, or at least to control the visibility and content of their communications. The migration of Millennials away from Facebook to the more anonymous Tumblr may be another sign. And the outcry raised by young Tumblr users in the wake of news that Yahoo! was purchasing the platform--driven by fears of more corporate control and increased advertising--only underscores the point.
  • Millennials are in the vanguard of mainstream online behavior: they were first on Facebook (after college students invited to the join in its earliest days), followed by their parents. A Millennial move towards greater online secrecy could represent the beginning of a larger shift that warrants additional research.
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  • Marketers are already confronting the implications of a more shadowy Internet, specifically the phenomenon known as DarkSocial and DarkSearch.
  • In the near-term, brands will have to confront a potentially darker Internet, as the roadblocks to data-driven marketing thrown up by DarkSocial, DarkSearch and an emerging DarkNet increase. There will be real consequences, including in investments in marketing, if it becomes more difficult to quantify customer engagement.
  • cloud services like Google and Apple are proactively stripping referral data out when sending users to third party sites via search. These DarkSearch visitors, like their DarkSocial counterparts, also end up in the “direct referral” bucket of analytics reporting, indistinguishable from the geography-less visitors who typed your domain name directly into their browsers to visit your site.
  • “DarkSocial,” estimates that 69% of the publication’s social traffic is dark--meaning users who access content by clicking on a link emailed or IMed to them. Marketers don’t know where these users came from or what exactly drove them to their website.
  • In the longer-term, we may see a nascent e-commerce system more familiar to science fiction fans (and current users of services like Silk Road, the online illegal drug marketplace). Imagine a future Amazon.com-like e-commerce site where all profiles are anonymous, all payments utilize crypto-currencies, and all deliveries of physical goods use inexpensive, multi-hop services that conceal the ultimate end delivery address behind anonymous dropboxes.
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