YouTube, Google+ Have An Engagement Advantage In Shareaholic Survey

They may lag in total referral traffic, but YouTube and Google+ bring in a more engaged audience, according to a Shareaholic survey released Monday.

The data, pulled from Shareaholic’s network of 200,000 sites and 250 million unique visitors for six months ending in February, showed that users coming from YouTube and G+ easily beat Facebook and Twitter on three key metrics: average time on site, average pages viewed per visit and average bounce rate.

It’s important to note that we are talking about very small numbers of referrals. Shareaholic’s data also show that traffic from YouTube is less than one-third of 1 percent and G+ is a minuscule four-hundredths of a percent.

But if you are looking for quality customers …

YouTube led the way, with its average user spending 3 minutes 47 seconds on sites — more than 1 1/2 minutes longer than people referred by Facebook or Twitter. Google+ visitors stuck around for 3 minutes 8 seconds. Time on site from LinkedIn users was 2 minutes 13 seconds, narrowly longer than Facebook (2 minutes 7 seconds) and Twitter (2 minutes 3 seconds).

Shareaholic’s thinking on why visitors from YouTube hang out longer?

Why are visitors from YouTube so engaged? …because video itself is so engaging and viewers are likely to maintain a similar level of engagement with related content. Therefore, video watchers are especially receptive to links within video descriptions which complement the audio+visual content they just consumed. Another reason YouTube takes home the crown is because viewers are simply used to spending minutes — perhaps, hours — educating and entertaining themselves with awesome video and may have fewer qualms about taking extra time to discover more great content post-click.

Other findings of note:

• Page view multipliers were fairly low across the board, after YouTube’s 2.99 pages. The average G+ user viewed 2.45 pages, and LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter hovered a bit over 2 pages.
• Facebook and Twitter are nearly identical when it comes to these metrics.
• Pinterest, Reddit and StumbleUpon users are the most fickle, viewing fewer pages on average, bouncing more often and spending an average of about 1 minute on a site.

Read more about Shareaholic’s findings here.

Here’s the data for the rankings:

And for reference here is Shareaholic’s most recent comparison of the social networks’ total referral traffic for the last four months of 2013:

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Martin Beck

Martin Beck was Third Door Media's Social Media Reporter from March 2014 through December 2015.