Social media may be all the buzz, but a recent report from Outbrain indicates that search portals are still the leading traffic drivers to content sites. Social traffic is on the rise, but search drives 300 percent more traffic than social media, according to the report.
For its Content Discovery and Engagement Report for Q1 2011, Outbrain assessed 100 million sessions across its top publishers. It found that search engines drive nearly half (41 percent) of external traffic to content sites. Other content sites came in second, delivering 31 percent of traffic.
Social media drove just 11 percent of external traffic to content sites. Outbrain notes that this shows social is gaining, and Facebook proved to be the third leading traffic source. This means marketers will want to distribute content across social sites to maximize traffic.
Nonetheless, search engines come out on top by a long shot, with Google being the No. 1 traffic driver. AOL and Yahoo took the second and third spots, respectively.
Articles in the news, entertainment and lifestyle categories were the most likely to receive traffic. Marketers may take this as a cue that it's time to consider custom news content marketing.
As Brafton reported, the value of news content was discussed at the recent ad:tech San Francisco conference. In her keynote, Arianna Huffington suggested that journalistic articles are the most effective in engaging online audiences.
