• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 22, 2019

Living Spaces’ use of social sites and search data to drive traffic to its website took an interesting twist in 2018. The furniture retailer saw a 39.1% average monthly traffic increase from social in 2018 compared with the prior year, according to data released Tuesday.

Traffic to the furniture retailer's website from social sites rose 250% in 2018. For this increase, Living Spaces received top honors in the SimilarWeb 2019 Momentum Awards.

But it’s not just about the increase -- it's about the sites and media the furniture retailer used. In 2018, for the first time, the livingspaces.com site saw the majority of its traffic coming from mobile devices. Shares rose 53.0%, compared with 46.5% in 2017. But the numbers that caught my attention were attached to Pinterest.

As for the sites, Living Spaces capitalized on Pinterest, which drove 57.8% of traffic to its site. YouTube followed -- driving 27.4% -- while Facebook came in at 9.2%, Reddit at 3%, and Dailymotion at 1.5%. This was a big change from the prior year when YouTube drove the most traffic at 37.5%, followed by Facebook at 29.7%, Pinterest at 14.8%, Reddit at 12.9%, and Twitter at 2.6%.

SimilarWeb highlights other interesting trends in its 2019 Momentum Awards, which analyzes companies that did well in the areas of branding, search engine optimization, referrals, social media and pay-per-click campaigns.

Despite challenges, each winner showcased the reasons for their decisions based on their resources. The awards recognize websites that have demonstrated improvements in organic and paid traffic between January 1 and December 31, 2018. The winners demonstrate how these brands built performance, traffic and engagement to their sites. A few are pretty interesting, while others show dramatic gains.

The distinction of the brand with the most growth goes to online travel booking site Agoda for growing its monthly traffic more than 39.8%, compared with the previous year.

About 75% of the site's branded search is organic. Through this strategy, the site hit an average monthly rate of 1.95 million visitors -- up from 1.40 million in the prior year. That is pretty impressive for a Singapore-based company acquired by Booking Holdings in 2007, which supports 53 offices in more than 30 countries.

While engagement rates during each visit rose by 1.27 minutes and the number of pages per visits increased by 10.1%, the share of traffic on desktop remained relatively stable in 2018, compared with 53% in 2017.

Another site using organic search to build online traffic to its site, Grailed, saw its volume of non-branded search traffic rose by 227%, from 949,000 to 3.1 million. The site, which is focused on men’s fashion, took the top spot for search engine optimization. During the past year the average volume of monthly traffic rose to 25.4%, compared with the prior year. During the same time, the number of unique visitors rose per month to 82.4%. The site sees the majority of its traffic on desktop, but mobile rose to 33.8% in 2018 -- up from 22% in 2017.

Referral traffic from affiliate partners also can help to strengthen a strategy. For example, take the winner of SimilarWeb’s referrals category. In 2018, getyourguide.com increased its absolute volume of referral traffic by 66%. The pool of referring websites to getyourguide.com rose from 317 to 604 sites. The Germany-based company diversified its affiliate network. Even as sites like booking.com dropped out of the top 10 referring websites, getyourguide.com managed huge gains in referral traffic.

Most interesting is that with most sites seeing traffic rise on mobile, this company’s traffic rose on desktop, with mobile shares down to 56.7% from 67.7% in 2017. The average monthly traffic to getyourguide.com in 2018 rose 13.2% in 2017 with unique visitors up by 34.3%.

The report provides a comprehensive list of the winners and the traffic driven to their websites through a variety of media.