Research deems Facebook traffic to be five times more valuable than Pinterest
New research published by customer data platform Qubit has suggested that the value of social media traffic directed to transactional websites is heavily dependent on the site of origin.
This found that visitors to Facebook were five times as likely to translate into a paying customer than an equivalent referral from Pinterest.
The researchers also found that the paths to purchase on many websites now entail multiple visits from different sources before a transaction is made – with paths from social sites being, on average, three times longer than one with no social involvement.
Graham Cooke, CEO of QuBit, said: “Understanding the value of social is going to be key to establishing its worth as a marketing channel. Many of the ways that people have used to measure the value of social in the past have been flawed and have missed some important aspects of its contribution to sales.
“These figures would seem to indicate that some of the recent scepticism about Facebook’s advertising model might be misplaced. It’s clear that the world’s largest social network is also the one that delivers brands some of the highest quality traffic.”
The research was compiled using QuBit’s Behavioural Attribution tool which uses advanced analysis of consumer behaviour to identify the true source of website purchasing behaviour.
This saw more than 50 million visits to retail, travel and financial services websites analysed over a six month period.