Any stats data advocating integrated social logins over traditional user / password login? [duplicate]

Question

Is there any published, statistical data that shows social logins (such as OpenID, Facebook, etc.) are preferable over traditional username / password login with regards to registration rates?

For example, for the same amount of user visits (of the same profile such as age, gender, education, etc.), which would gain more registrations / sign-ups? The social logins or in-house username / password login?

If no such data are present, anyone care to provide some insights from your own website analytics for comparison? I ask this is because I personally asked a few of my users and neither was more favored over the other given in-house registration is simple to complete.

Answer 1

Benny Skogberg is spot on in saying that the more options you provide, the higher the chances of registration since users might opt for registration using the standard registration module or the social login options.

That said, studies have shown that having a social login option does increase your conversion rate. To quote this article

We wanted to test the increase in conversion that social sign on creates. To do that, we looked at a series of campaigns that had either just a regular old form, and compared those against similar campaigns that had both a regular old form AND a Social Sign-On option (in these tests, it was LinkedIn).

When both were present, 86% of submissions occurred through the regular old form, and 14% occurred through the social option. The Social Sign-On is cannibalizing the regular form submissions to some extent (people switching from the regular old form to the social). Where it gets interesting is when you compare the overall conversion rates to the standard form only. A form with both options converts 8.5% MORE website visitors to form submitters!

Also a couple of responses from quora do confirm that social logins have increased conversions (Note : I am aware that it is not a written statistical study but anecdotal information can be useful too) To quote the quora post :

Full disclosure, I am a marketing manager at Gigya. We provides social login for hundreds of heavily trafficked sites with millions of users authenticating via social login. Typically, we see conversion rates increase anywhere from 20-40% after social login implementation.

Keep in mind that conversion rate is highly dependent on the following factors: - Choice of social networks for login. It's suggested to offer at least three social identity providers to start with. Not all users want to sign in with Facebook. In fact, our aggregate stats show that about 60% of users authenticate with Facebook, 12% Google, 10% Twitter, and a variety of other social networks make up the rest.

With regards to which social login option can greatly work for your demographic, I strongly recommend reading this excellent article which compares login and registration via social logins and their distributions. To quote an excerpt from the article

When it comes to social login, people want choice. Facebook currently leads as the most popular identity provider for social login. During Q3, Facebook lost a bit of ground with its share dropping slightly to 45%,

Google has gradually closed the gap on Facebook as the second most popular choice, and its share increased a fraction of a percent during Q2

Answer 2

It really depends on the user needs, the number of services they use and if they trust a third party identity provider. A user who only uses one or two services may not need the third party identity provider – they remember credentials since they are limited. Nevertheless, a heavy service user like me – using 30+ different services weekly, it’s impossible to remember credentials on each site. Users like me love to use third party identity providers. It makes us not having to remember (read write down) every sites credential.

There are also services (Magine as one example) out there who just uses third party identity providers, and don’t have their own credential system. The only way to get in is to use your Google-, Facebook- or Twitter account.

However, as always, the more different options you provide to the users, the better. Some love to use username/password, other users’ third party identity providers. Support both, and your user will appreciate your effort.