The 2014 Mid-Year Digital Traffic Report

With 2014 now more than halfway done, we wanted to provide an update on the major search and social trends we’re seeing across our network. In many ways, the data in this post is an update to our “Hey Buzzfeed, Search Traffic is Doing Just Fine” analysis, which included data through year ending 2013.

As with all of our research, in this analysis we’re mining aggregate, anonymized data from our client roster. This includes 127 different sites, spanning 59 categories, totaling 8 billion visits and 36 billion pageviews through end of June 2014.

Major takeaways are:

1. Search and Direct are the largest traffic drivers with 39% of traffic each, followed by Social with 22%:
2. Despite the widely-cited comScore report that says Google has a 67% search market share, our direct reporting shows something very different, with Google holding 86% of search market search. With these near-monopolistic numbers, it’s no wonder Google doesn’t put out its own market share figures.
3. Social Traffic has continued to increase, reaching new highs in 2014, though as the trendline shows search is still a significantly stronger traffic driver:
4. Mobile (comprised of both phone and tablet devices) is responsible for 26% of all traffic. This is up from 15% as recently as 2012:
   With Matt Cutts publicly stating that mobile queries may overtake desktop queries this year, this is another stark reminder that mobile needs to be at the forefront of your digital strategy.