If a marketer from Mars landed on earth today, read through the last 12 months of tech news, and was asked to come to a conclusion about the largest drivers of inbound traffic to web sites based on the frequency of coverage, his answer would probably contain the words "Pinterest," "Twitter," and "Facebook," and organic search would not even be on his radar.

However, marketers are not from Mars, and are supposed to care about “data.” They are highly familiar with the statistics that point to search's place at the top of the purchase funnel -- such as Marketing Sherpa’s, which states 81% of online adults use search engines to research products.  So why has the media been so successful in distracting marketers from the data-driven, core marketing tactics that drive the lion's share of traffic?

An overwhelming example of this was a recent TechCrunch article, “Pinterest Overtakes Twitter on Referring Traffic.”  Reading this headline of the post, you may be left thinking you need to shift serious online marketing effort to Pinterest.  I have no doubt many marketers forwarded this to their teams asking “Should we be doing more on Pinterest?”

What was not mentioned, however, was the glaring discrepancy between the traffic Pinterest is driving, even at its current growth rates, and what tried-and-true channels such as organic search continue to generate .  Using a sample size of 270 million visits, Pinterest is now 1.05% of all visits, beating Twitter at less than 1% (.82%) of all visits.  Google’s organic traffic is nearly half (48.81%) of all visits – almost 50x Pinterest’s traffic, and 5x more then all social sites combined.  In our example, the marketing VP wants to know when his team is going to ramp up their Pinterest strategy -- yet he probably does not have a comprehensive SEO strategy, has not spent a lot of time thinking about how his company can build a competency in SEO, and is spending valuable thinking time about the less-than-1% of Pinterest traffic potential.

Read the full Search Insider article here