Pinterest drives more referral traffic than Twitter, Google and Bing

The little social network that could is continuing to surprise the critics by climbing up the list of the top social media referrers — it generated more referral traffic than Twitter back in March, and now it seems it’s sending more social media users around the web than Google, Bing and StumbleUpon too.

According to the latest stats from Shareaholic (via TechCrunch), Pinterest accounts for 1.19% of visits on its network of over 200 000 publishers. Ok, so all of the social media platforms (including the largest — Facebook) have nowhere near as much power as Google search (organic search accounts for more than 46% of referrals), but it makes Pinterest the fourth highest source of traffic after Google organic search, Facebook and Yahoo!

The study doesn’t mention Google+ — although some of its previous reports suggest that the number of referrals from Pinterest overtook the volume from Google’s social network back in January. The Google referrals in the latest report are visits that don’t come through Google search or Adwords, but rather from Google Groups or related sites.

Pinterest is not just winning the web in terms of referral traffic — according to Statcounter, it’s climbing up the global ranks of the top social media sites too. In June, Pinterest overtook Twitter in its ranking system, securing the fourth spot behind Facebook (of course), YouTube and StumbleUpon. It hasn’t confirmed its user numbers, but some sources estimate Pinterest is attracting anything from 20-37 million unique users a month.