Chris Nuttall and David Gelles have reportered in the Financial Times  (Published: March 16 2010) that social networking website Facebook has capped a year of phenomenal growth by overtaking Google’s popularity among US internet users, with industry data showing it has scored more visits on its home page than the search engine.

In a sign that the web is becoming more sociable than searchable, research firm Hitwise said that the two sites accounted for 14 per cent of all US internet visits last week. Facebook’s home page recorded 7.07 per cent of traffic and Google’s 7.03 per cent. Some other highlights;

• Facebook’s membership has more than doubled in the past year, passing the 200m mark last April and 400m in February.

• Google has responded to the ascendancy of the social networking site with its own Buzz service last month. Buzz allows users to add status updates, friends, pictures, videos, location information, comments and links to other networking sites.

• Internet users worldwide spent more than five-and-a-half hours a month on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter in December 2009, an 82 per cent increase over the previous year, according to the Nielsen Company research firm.

Enform believes that this points to Facebook becoming the ubiquitous home page for more users in place of search engines and other social media sites. In fact, it suggest the evolution of social media away from its perceived position as simply another kids thing to that of a multi-modal contact and virtual “touch-point” for connected individuals and usomer’s.

They used to say “you have to be on Google” to make it on the web… now Facebook?

Google Analytics Dashboard

Web analytics is one of the most powerful yet underrated online marketing tools on the web. Google Analytics is not the most powerful but it has one significant advantage over many others – its free.

Wikipedia defines web analytics as “the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage”. Have a look at their excellent summary here and consider the possibilities available via a well set up tracking engine.

Imagine knowing which specific pages your customers from Albania looked at and how they were referred to that page? What time of the day was it? Was the Albanian interest level the same as the same time last year and how many converted to a sale or reached the specified goal target? And how does your site compare with your peers or competitors and which words generate the most inbound traffic through native search?

These are but a small sample of what’s available free through Google, its easy to setup and the reporting options are more extensive than most people will every try.  If you have the functionality installed, ask Enform to help you show what’s possible. If you haven’t got analytics tracking yet, talk to Enform about helping you set up.

The good news is that you’re site is getting heaps of referrals from Google images, thet bad news is that they all resolve to a generic images URL. How do we find the referring or keyword text?

 Ten points to Beno John for putting together a solution using this script . Once done, you can then track inbound in your analytics account.