Social Media Referrals

Michael 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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