Most social clicks die on the homepage. That is the finding of Bitly survey data reported by Search Engine Journal: 79 percent of consumers quit social links that land on a homepage. The number is a warning about the most common lazy habit in social marketing, which is to link everything to the front door and assume the visitor will find their own way in. They will not. They leave, and the click you paid for, in time or money, is wasted.
A homepage is built to serve everyone, which means it serves no one in particular. A person who clicks a link about a specific product, article, or offer arrives with a specific expectation, and a homepage answers a different question: what is this company. The gap between expectation and arrival is measured in seconds, and most visitors resolve it by leaving. Bitly's survey puts a number on that behaviour, and the number is high enough that it should end the argument about whether deep linking is worth the effort.
The problem is compounded by short links. A shortened link hides the destination, so the visitor has no way to know where they are going until they arrive. If they arrive at a homepage, the short link has done its job of getting the click and failed at the job of delivering the visitor to the right place. Search Engine Journal's report makes the point that SEOs should look beyond short links and fix the mismatched landing pages behind them, and rethink what click-through rates reveal. A high click-through rate on a link that lands on the wrong page is not a success. It is a leak.
The fix starts with an audit of where social links actually go. Check the links in bios, pinned posts, and recent campaigns, and follow each one as a visitor would. Every link that lands on a homepage instead of the specific page it promised is a link to fix. The destination should match the promise of the post, in subject, in detail, and in the next step the visitor is expected to take. A link about a product should land on the product. A link about an article should land on the article. A link about an offer should land on the offer, with the offer visible without scrolling.
The second fix is measurement. Click-through rate tells you the link was attractive. It tells you nothing about whether the visit was useful. Measure what happens after the click: how many visitors stay, how many reach the promised content, and how many convert. If a link has a high click rate and a high quit rate, the link is not the problem. The landing page is.
For SEOs, the Bitly finding is a reminder that a link's value depends on its destination. A social link that sends visitors to a homepage does not just waste the visit. It teaches the visitor that your links are not worth following, which makes the next link less likely to be clicked. Deep links, by contrast, build trust: the visitor learns that your links deliver what they promise, and the next click comes more easily.
For link builders, the lesson applies to earned links as well. When outreach wins a placement, the URL matters as much as the link itself. A link to a specific, useful page will earn engagement, return visits, and further links. A link to a homepage will earn a bounce. Pitch the specific page, not the site, and make sure the page it points to is the best version of that content you have. The click is only the beginning. The landing page is where the value is made.
Sources: Search Engine Journal, November 2026, reporting Bitly survey data.
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