How Engaged is Your Social Media Traffic?
Google Analytics knows, all it takes is a little digging.
Do social media visitors really stay on your website longer and engage more with your website? More importantly is all that time you spend on social media driving traffic to your website really worth it? Let’s take a look.
The data is easily available from Google Analytics, but a little prep work is necessary to get the social media traffic numbers. Google has traffic sources categories for Search Engines, Direct Traffic, and Referring Sites, but it doesn’t break down social media referrals. You can do that manually by combing through your analytics report, or you can use this excellent tool by Jeff Larche, posted on Social Media Explorer: How Much Traffic Do You Get From Social Media?
After you install Jeff’s tool, you’ll need to let it accumulate a month’s worth of data, before you can make a fair comparison. I’ve done that, so let’s dive in to the numbers. We will measure engagement using three different metrics: 1) Pages per Visit 2) Bounce Rate 3) Average Time on Site. I’ve left in the the % of New Visits metric, although it doesn’t indicate engagement. Here’s what I discovered about engagement for TheMarketingSpot.com
All Website Traffic Engagement
Social Media Website Traffic Engagement
Search Engine Website Traffic Engagement
As you can see the differences are minimal. Social media traffic visitors spent slightly more time on TheMarketingSpot.com and had a lower bounce rate. But the difference is nothing to write home about. In my analysis, I did find one interesting anomaly. Traffic referred from Hootsuite, a social media management tool, showed significantly more engagement.
Hootsuite Referral Traffic Engagement
Why the big difference? Hootsuite is my primary tool for managing my social media presence. It’s where I share links on Twitter and Facebook to my blog . So the people clicking on these links to my blog are people who follow me and are interested in my stuff. My highest level of social media traffic engagement is from people I am directly engaged with on social media. Imagine that!
Social Media vs. Search Engine Traffic
If you’re going for sheer volume, it’s no contest. Generally just over 10% of of website visitors are referrals from social media sites, and 41% from search engines. For TheMarketingSpot.com, social media drives 6% of my website traffic, while search engines are responsible 62% of my visitors.
The thing is, blogging is a format that merges both social media and search engine traffic. Blogging was one of the early social media, but with the rise of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, it’s thought of less as a social medium and more of a content publishing platform. But the importance of blogging cannot be understated. Blogging creates the content that drives both social media and search engine traffic to your website.
Know Your Numbers
These are the numbers for my website, but every website is different. Knowing your numbers may change your perspective. For me, the Hootsuite numbers were quite a surprise, but told me the more time I spend engaging on social media, the more engaged my website traffic will be. The only question that must be answered: Is it really worth it? Does social media traffic volume justify the time you spend on social media?
Continue reading here: Can You Continue to Ignore Mobile Marketing?
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