The growing importance of achieving direct traffic in the face of changes in social networks and search engines.

Luca de Tena Foundation: Journalism Laboratory

By Redacción

The International News Media Association (INMA) held its first webinar of the year, which addressed, among other issues, the need for media outlets to work much harder on strategies to attract direct traffic, rather than relying on search and social media for referrals.

Alexandra Beverfjord, executive vice president of Aller Media and CEO of Dagbladet, urged publishers to develop a strategy focused on direct traffic in the face of a significant decline in referrals from social networks. On the other hand, however, Mariëlle Vermeer, head of data and social for Telegraaf/Mediahuis in the Netherlands, indicated that a strategy of achieving direct traffic should not come at the expense of working social networks, given their ability to attract target audiences, arguing that "in my opinion, you have to leverage everything."

Vermeer relied on the Reuters Institute/Oxford University Digital News Report 2023, which shows that the vast majority of under-35s still use social networks, search engines or news aggregators as their primary means of getting news online and that, therefore, if the media neglect attracting audiences on social networks, specific niches will not be reached and it will be complicated for them to end up converting into direct traffic as they will no longer be able to be loyalized.

In the line of alerting about the need to work more on direct traffic, whether reducing effort in social networks and SEO, or not, as INMA collects in a recent article, there are many reports that present a worrying view of the trends in search and social networks this year, and that place the need to work direct traffic as a priority.

Data from analytics company Chartbeat indicates that aggregate traffic from Facebook to news and media properties is down 48%, with drops in traffic coming from X of 27% and Instagram of 10%. In addition, publishers anticipate further substantial declines in referral traffic as artificial intelligence is integrated into search engines and other portals.

In the Reuters Institute survey, 77% of publishers say they will work harder to build direct links with readers through platforms they can control, such as their websites, apps, newsletters and more.

Media analyst Thomas Baekdal also addressed this issue recently in his newsletter, reiterating that publishers should focus on building their own audiences. "When we focus specifically on direct traffic, we see that there is a small but declining trend," Baekdal wrote.

"This, of course, is not good. Because of the problem we are experiencing with social traffic, it has become vital for publishers to focus on building their own audiences...that is, getting people to come to you directly and use your journalism as a 'destination' rather than as a random click on Facebook."