Two weeks ago, Facebook opened up its Instant Articles platform to all publishers. And last week, Facebook announced that they will be updating their News Feed algorithm once again. The most recent change to their algorithm will look at predictions of whether a user in the Facebook mobile browser or on an Instant Article page will click into an article and actually read that article. Time spent viewing the article will continue to be a large factor in News Feed rankings.
When Facebook makes changes, the publishing industry reacts with questions and concerns (see, for example, here, here, or here). That said, each time we here at Chartbeat have looked at Facebook referrer traffic in response to one of these changes, we haven’t seen any major effect across our network. Here’s what the median percentage of traffic from Facebook looks like across our network so far this year:
Besides the typical weekday / weekend variations, traffic from Facebook is remarkably stable. We see Facebook driving between 40-50% of traffic on mobile devices during peak weekday traffic and about 12-15% of traffic on desktop devices during peak weekday traffic (note that these numbers exclude cases in which we have no data for referrer, as is the case for dark social). Even given the two big changes that happened this month, we are actually seeing a slightly higher-than-normal amount of referral traffic! This increased traffic is on the order of 3-4% for the median (smaller if you look at the average; 1%).
It is important to note that these curves show the median proportion across our network. Individual sites respond in different ways, so you may have seen your traffic rise or fall in response to one of these changes. Sitting in the newsroom, it is hard to see the forest for the trees, so to speak — we have the power of statistics on our side. But from what we continue to see, the majority of publishers are incredibly adept at responding to Facebook’s changes and are keeping referral numbers high.