go-Digital Blog on Digital Marketing

Social network Pinterest now refers more users to websites than either Twitter or Yahoo!, according to new figures.

The figures, released by social sharing widget provider Shareaholic, reveals that 1.84% of users to websites using its tools were sent from Pinterest, which has now overtaken Yahoo! (1.37% of visitors), Bing (1.03%), StumbleUpon (0.97%) and Twitter (0.80%) as a source of visitors.

However, Pinterest remains significantly behind Google (41.28%), direct traffic (20.03%) and Facebook (5.9%) as a source of traffic.

The figures were drawn by examining traffic sources from 200,000 websites using Shareaholic’s web tools.

UPDATED  Feb 12, 2013

Search engines still dwarf email and social media as an e-commerce traffic driver. 32% of e-commerce site visits in Q4 came from search, compared to 4.3% from email and just 1.9% from social media. In fact, Q4 marked the third consecutive quarter that social media’s influence waned.

Traffic from search engines also tends to have a larger average order value (AOV) than the other sources analyzed by Monetate. In Q4, AOV from search was $97.54, about 9% higher than from email ($89.64) and roughly 40% higher than from social ($69.46).

About the Data: Monetate’s E-commerce Quarterly analyzes a random sample of over 100 million online shopping experiences using “same store” data across each calendar quarter. Averages throughout the EQ are calculated across the entire sample. Key performance indicators, such as average order value and conversion rate, will vary by industry/market type. These averages are published only to support the analysis in each release of the EQ, and are not intended to be benchmarks for any e-commerce business.