Social Media Referrals
March 16, 2009 at 8:00 am
by ChrisMichael Learmonth at AdAge's 'Digital' blog posted last week that Facebook is sending more traffic than Google to some sites. He specifically mentioned sites like PerezHilton.com, CafeMom, Evite, and Tagged.com, noting that sites which receive lots of loyal repeat traffic are likely to be boosted by social media, since visitors are using those platforms to share content and direct others to the sites they like.
I decided to take a quick look at where Facebook falls among the top referrers to our site. If you take a look at the screenshot below, you'll see that Facebook is currently the #7 referrer to our site (I filtered out images.google.com, by the way. In my opinion, traffic from that search engine doesn't count). One thing that is interesting to note, though, is that Facebook seems to refer more lasting traffic than several of the others outranking it. The average pages per visit for Facebook-referred traffic is 2.92, while for Yahoo it's 1.76. Even Google is at 2.02.
Even more interesting are the stats around LinkedIn. LinkedIn sent about 160 referrals to our site in the last month, with an average of 4.11 pages per visit. That's much better than Facebook in terms of lasting traffic. But then I wondered how many of these visitors end up subscribing to our newsletter. For LinkedIn, it's 2.5%, almost twice the average of Facebook-referred visitors that subscribe (1.4%)! Surely, this has much to do with our activity in several LinkedIn groups, including our own group, Web Development for Advertising Agencies
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We are experiencing similar results, although LinkedIn is our number one source. Here are our top five:
1.linkedin.com / referral 596 visits/3.93 ppv
2.(direct) / (none) 283 visits /3.61 ppv
3.google / organic 178 visits /4.60 ppv
4.twitter.com / referral 47visits / 2.77 ppv
5. facebook.com / referral 44 visits/ 2.09 ppv
Mark,
Wow, that's interesting that Google is not at the top! Was it ever for you guys? If so, when did it drop?
Chris
Doesn't this just mean that people who already know about you are following links to your site from these social networks? I mean, what's the value of attracting attention from people that are already in your network?
Tom,
I don't think it means just that. People within our network are linking to our content, which makes it visible to other people in their network, but perhaps not within ours directly. Also, we advertise on LinkedIn and Facebook, which drives traffic to our site. You can read more about that in a post I wrote called Why should someone with a job spend time with Linkedin? We also are getting more and more traffic to our site through our LinkedIn group, Web Development for Advertising Agencies. Many people have joined this group that are probably not aware that we manage it- it's not specifically branded as a Newfangled entity. You can read more about the results of the group in a post called What is Our Tribe About?
Thanks for your comment,
Chris