Social Sites
OCTOBER 22, 2009
Coming back for more
Visitors are good, but loyal visitors are even better. Where can you find them?
According to research by ad network Chitika, social sites Facebook and Digg are more likely to send returning traffic your way than search engines such as Yahoo!, Google and Bing.
More than one-fifth of users referred to a site by Facebook visited at least four times in the course of a week. Less than 12% of Google-referred visitors were as loyal.
Visitors coming from Twitter were the least likely to return among the sites studied.
Still, social media sites are only sending a tiny fraction of traffic. An earlier Chitika Study concluded that “the overwhelming dominance of search engines is facing little, if any, threat from social networks.”
The company looked at the top sites sending traffic to the publishers in its network and found that Google alone accounted for 76.13% of referrals.
Taken together, search engines made almost 98% of all referrals, while social networking sites made up just 0.55%.
Twitter in particular—despite the hype—was low on referrals, and falling. In July, Twitter was No. 24 on Chitika’s list of top referrers, with 0.05%. By September, it had moved down to 44th place, with just a 0.02% share.
