Google sends more traffic than Facebook to publishers: Report

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Google has beaten Facebook to become publishers' main source of external page views over the course of 2017, a new data showed.

Google used to be the main source of referral traffic for web publishers. Then Facebook eclipsed it, ReCode reported late on Monday.

According to digital analytics company Parse.ly, Google sent more traffic than Facebook to publishers -- Facebook sent 25 per cent less traffic to publishers in 2017, while Google increased its traffic by 17 per cent.

In January, Facebook provided nearly 40 per cent of publishers' external traffic which is now down to 26 per cent.

Google, which started the year at 34 per cent, generated 44 per cent of the total traffic.

Parse.ly pointed out a number of factors for this turnaround.

In 2016 Facebook tweaked its algorithm to prioritise posts from friends and family over publishers.

Also, Facebook's "Instant Articles" feature, where the service hosted some publishers' content directly but promised to send more readers to the original site as well, has declined in importance, the analytics company found.

Since users can now publish videos directly on Facebook, this might have affected how many links to web stories publishers put on their Facebook pages.

Google's "accelerated mobile pages" (AMP) feature, which also hosts publishers' content directly on Google's servers, became more important over the year.

AMP stories - typically from news publishers - are surfaced at the top of mobile search results as "Top Stories," which drives clicks.

Google and Facebook dominated the online advertising in the third quarter this year as global online advertising revenue growth reached a record 29.6 per cent, market research firm Forrester said on Tuesday.

Google was by far the biggest contributor to market growth, with an additional $4.2 billion in spending compared to a year ago -- 40 per cent of the $10.5 billion growth in spending for 13 digital media companies.

With year-over-year growth rate of 21.4 per cent, Google's ad growth was the fastest in at least six quarters.

The Forrester's Digital Marketing Tracker looked at 13 digital firms which included Google, Facebook, Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, together constituting more than 75 per cent of the online advertising market.

"At the moment, Google appears to be dealing just fine with challenges like the unintentional placement of YouTube advertisements next to questionable content and the encroachment of Amazon into eCommerce advertising," the report added.

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