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1st, the conclusion: The average site gets 21% of their site traffic from referring sites. Once you exclude email, which Google Analytics includes in referring sites, the percentage of referring site traffic from the top social media sites is an astonishing 54%, or 9.6% of their overall site traffic.
We just finished combing through Google analytics data for a 2 dozen sites, with a distribution of attributes:
We calculated the percentage of last 30 day site traffic from referring sites, excluding email referrers, and then added up all the Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, YouTube, Foursquare and Quora traffic to these sites, to get a percent of site traffic from social media. We considered using other sites, like MySpace and Digg, but the numbers were too marginal to include, so they were excluded from the data. After assembling the data, we threw out the outliers (the top and bottom performers- that is for a later post, there is much to be learned there).
The range on these numbers, given the difference in their investment in social media and overall go to market strategy, was in a much narrower band than expected.
Range in percent of traffic from referring sites (excluding email): 11.13% to 27.16% (Mean: 21%). The richer or more established a site was, the lower this number (SEO, paid ads and other techniques unavailable to less established sites seemed to be the difference here).
Range in percent of referring site traffic from social media: 28% to 63.55% (Mean: 54%). The highest performers in this area all had an element of community in their social media strategy- they had done a great job of getting embedded and interacting in the community, or creating compelling content, which spurred others to act on their behalf, driving the highest results.
Facebook and Twitter didn't show any particular differentiating trends- other than they tended to reflect the interaction focus of a brand. For example, if the company had a big Twitter effort, that drove Social Media. if they had a big Facebook effort, that took the lead. The big surprise here was the impact of StumbleUpon. Those sites lucky enough to get Stumbled really got a lift in month. LinkedIn was a surprisingly low number, leading us to believe that the social promotion value of this site is still undetermined.
Before we get too carried away on the magnitude of social media impact, don't forget that the other half was from good old fashioned relationships and PR- getting people to link to you, talk about you or tell your story in a blog or news environment.
Whether you think that driving site traffic via social media is a nice bonus or a critical element of ROI, we like to see benchmarks. When you get your own data back, where do you fall? What's the missed opportunity for your site or organization?
Have a great day.
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Christine Mason Mccaull
