The Importance of Sharing: Measuring the Real Impact of Twitter, Facebook and Digg
A week ago Fred Wilson dove into his blog’s stats to answer this question: Does this blog get more traffic from Google or Twitter? On the surface, it appears that Google drove more — nearly 15% of his visits versus Twitter’s 8%. But over the past year he’s also seen an unexpected jump in his “Direct Traffic,” visitors who start a browser session at his site rather than linking in from another website.
“If just 7% of the 17% increase in direct traffic is a result of twitter links that are not being counted as twitter [because many Twitter users use desktop applications like TweetDeck that wouldn't show up as a referral site], then it is true that this blog gets more traffic from twitter than google.”
It’s a believable scenario given that @fredwilson has more than 27,000 engaged Twitter followers. Results may vary, though, since we more average Twitter publishers have only 126 followers. For PC Mag (with fewer than 7000 followers), Twitter is a much less significant traffic source, less than one percent of visits to Google’s 4%. But like Fred Wilson’s AVC, PC Mag’s top source of traffic isn’t Google, it’s a sharing site — Digg drives 81% of the visitors for some articles.
And as Bit.ly’s Andrew Kortina explains, most Direct Traffic to most sites isn’t really direct traffic from loyal readers that bookmark your site or type its URL into a browser. It’s traffic generated by readers sharing story links with her or her friends and followers.
“The only reason hits to pages other than your homepage show up under Direct Traffic is because they do not have an HTTP Referer Header. Typically, in your browser, when you click a link on Page X to Page Y, your browser sends a bit of data along with the request to fetch Page Y from wherever it’s being server that says, ‘by the way, this request was referred by Page X.’ Desktop applications — email clients like Outlook, for example — do not send this referrer data, so clicks derived from these apps get grouped under Direct Traffic….
“In fact, very little Direct Traffic is actually direct. A better name for Direct Traffic would be Shared Link Traffic — think about the apps that are likely to generate this type of traffic: email clients, twitter clients, desktop RSS readers, facebook clients. These are all essentially sharing tools.”
I followed Kortina’s instructions to calculate ChasNote’s Shared Link Traffic. Here are my traffic sources according to Google Analytics:
The message I take away from this overview is: Great, I’m pleasing 17% of my audience enough that they come back on their own. It’s nice that 46% of my traffic comes from editorial pick-ups by other sites (Referral Traffic), mostly blogs somewhere out there in the Long Tail, but I can’t do much to influence that. So I’m going to spend my time and resources getting more from Google. I better optimize my URLs, page layouts and story headlines for search, and if I ever invest in online marketing, the first call I’ll make is to Google.
When I isolate Shared Link Traffic — removing so-called Direct Traffic that lands on a story page (URLs too long for anyone to type into a browser and too static for anyone to bookmark) as well as Referral Traffic that’s coming from sharing platforms like Digg, Twitter and Facebook — I come to a different conclusion.
Forty-eight percent of my traffic is Shared Link Traffic. In my case it’s four sources — Digg, Twitter, TechMeme and Facebook — plus (I’m guessing) email sharing. This changes my strategy. First, I’m not doing as well as thought with loyal readers: They represent 8% instead of 17% of my audience. Second, I’m going to change my optimization priorities. Since Shared Link Traffic is 48% (to Google’s 37%), I should focus on “social media optimization” — making it easier to share my stories — before I invest in search engine optimization. And when that request for the ChasNote marketing budget clears Finance, I’m going to call Twitter, Facebook and myself here at Digg before I call Google.
Nice writing. You are on my RSS reader now so I can read more from you down the road.
Allen Taylor
One reader emailed me to ask why I’ve left links coming from blog sites in the Referral Traffic bucket, since blogs are also platforms where individuals share links and stories with their communities. My reply to him was this: “You make a good point about Ref Traffic — isn’t all of it done by someone (a blogger, a Twitter user or a Digg member) who’s sharing a link with his readers, followers or fans? In this case, I considered editorial publishers (bloggers or orther edit content sites) as Ref Traffic vs explicit sharing platforms (Facebook.com, Twitter.com, Digg.com, etc) as Shared Link platforms.”
“I should focus on “social media optimization” — making it easier to share my stories — before I invest in search engine optimization”–not necessarily. The ROI for some simple page content SEO is good and might be worth before tackling the more formidable challenge of increasing social media presence. For example, install the SEO optimizer plugin on Wordpress or just optimizing your page content by hand, and submitting a sitemap to Google are a few hours worth of work well worth putting in. Search traffic, some say, is not as valuable as traffic from shared links. I tend to agree with this, but as Twitter becomes more mainstream, you might actually be able to drive search visitors to follow you on Twitter (with a link like this one at the end of each post: http://bit.ly/yBXX2 ).
I guess what I’m saying is this stuff all works together, so don’t ignore SEO because it’s pretty easy to do.
Kortina–You’re absolutely right: These things work together and it would be silly to ignore SEO. But I do think our whole industry has let the pendulum swing too far to the mathematical, direct-response Google worldview (where it’s all about search and search marketing) at the expense of other smart web-publishing tactics that take human emotions and passions into account.
Meanwhile: That post you link to is fascinating. “I’m on Twitter” convinced 4.7% of his readers to click; “You should follow me on Twitter here” convinced 12.8% of them. Wow. The power of well-chosen words.
lies, damned lies, and statistics!
I think what you want to define is what success means for chasnote – which is probably more difficult than deciphering how someone came to your site. My hunch is that you want to grow repeat visitors and grow thoughtful participation, which should lead to growing your brand recognition. None of those slices of the pie really measure any of that.
So how do you make the pie higher?
Rolf–
Very true. If a publication doesn’t establish a loyal readership, better marketing and audience acquisition won’t be enough. Poor ChasNote, it turns out, is doing worse than I thought on that front, and participation in the content is likely the key. Comments on my stories are pretty sparse, though they’ve increased since I added Facebook Connect. I’d argue, though, that sharing — Digging, Tweeting, etc — is another form of participation. If I can do a better job of creating content that inspires sharing, I win on two fronts. One, I’ve engaged with people more deeply so they’re more likely to come back to my content another time (greater loyalty to the ChasNote brand). Two, the sharing inspired by better content will bring new customers to the site (greater Shared Link Traffic). Any ideas on how I motivate more engaged sharing?!
That’s the magic sauce, isn’t? Getting the audience to really engage. But you’re right, I was thinking a bit old school in terms of participation. Often times the the conversation doesn’t happen directly in the comments, but rather, it bounces between a couple blogs (I’ll stand on my soapbox, you stand on yours, and we’ll shout to each other!)
Often, the key ingredients in the magic sauce are timing and opinion on a controversial topic (for a particular audience) or other mass emotional event. The more provocative names in blogging are obvious examples. But I recently came across a blog called “Brand New” – opinions on corporate and brand identity work. A very loyal following with lots of comments, because designers love to debate the pros and (more typically) cons of logo changes and branding changes. Of course, it starts with an intelligent, well informed blog post.
Now, see how you got me to reply again, just by pitching my question right back at me?
Getting back to metrics, looking ahead to the future, but staying somewhat on topic — I’ve been reading up on the new HTML5 spec, and there is a new attribute being added called “ping”, which likely is exciting to advertisers and frightening to privacy freaks:
“The ping attribute, if present, gives the URLs of the resources that are interested in being notified if the user follows the hyperlink. The value must be a space separated list of one or more valid URLs. The value is used by the user agent for hyperlink auditing.”
Think about that!
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#ping
Sure, I got you back for more commenting, Rolf. But are you Digging the story and Tweeting it out to all your friends? I’ve seen that t-shirt you wear: You ARE huge on Twitter, right??
you know me, chas, I’m kinda old fashioned that way… I totally dig the story, man.
[...] Chas wrote an interesting post today onThe Importance of Sharing: Measuring the Real Impact of Twitter <b>…</b>Here’s a quick excerpt [...]
Nice writing. You are on my RSS reader now so I can read more from you down the road.
have a nice day
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