The Organ Grinder’s Monkey

Patrick Coffey has an insightful - and statistically supported - take on why making the front page of a major aggregator site like Digg, Stumble Upon or Reddit doesn’t do you any good.

His key message? A small amount of highly targeted or qualified visitors will out-convert a tidal wave of random visitors every time.

Through some trial and error, Alexis was able to help our natural health e-letter site get a boatload of traffic from Stumbleupon. In fact, in the last month, one page generated over 28,000 new visitors.

When I heard this, I thought it was great news. You see, when we get traffic from outside sources, we can generally convert at least 10 percent of it into e-mail sign-ups.

So how many of these 28,000 social media visitors do you think signed up for our natural health e-letter?

500? 1,000? 1,500? 2,800?

No! Try 80. That’s a conversion rate of just over 0.2 percent.

In the article, he notes that the reason for this is that social media visitors are notoriously hard to convert. They tend to be very ad and marketing savvy (and resistant), they rarely sign up for stuff like newsletters and they don’t tend to stay around on a site for very long (stickiness is vital to making sales). He also notes that the added expense of the bandwidth use and server strain also detracts from any value this sort of traffic brings

Being someone that surfs the social media sites for news and other interesting tidbits, I have to agree with his conclusions. I rarely stay on any site I click through - usually just long enough to skim it for relevant news. I almost never sign up for anything on the sites (who needs more inbox filler?), nor do I buy stuff. I’m news and giggles hunting, not shopping.

Of course, your mileage may vary. Increasing your traffic can help sell advertising and increase awareness of your existence. Plus, sites that get Dugg or Stumbled stand a better chance of attracting the attention of top-level media sites, highly-rated blogs or other websites that can provide qualified visitors. And if your product or service truly does fit the needs of all those Diggers, you might have better luck with the sales. So it’s not all bad news.

The key here is that social media sites are a great tool for getting traffic, but getting traffic is meaningless unless that traffic converts once it’s on your site. If they don’t, then no matter how many hits you get you’re no better off than a storekeeper on the Pamplona bull run. There’s a lot of people running by, but none of them are going to stop and shop.

This doesn’t mean you should ignore these sites. Nor does it mean that hitting the front page is pointless. Just keep in mind that for the most part, it unlikely to bring you much of anything other than a temporary spike in transient traffic. To increase sales, you need to increase your exposure to specific, qualified people. Everyone else is just passing through.

Tags: Conversation Economy, Internet Marketing, Social Media //