Three months after I found myself embroiled in a blogging firestorm with the National Pork Board on my hobby site, Matt Bailey has sat down and taken the time to put together an excellent article that explores the traffic, engagement rates and conversion rates from the site's social media hits. Since the story spread far and wide through the blog world and made the front page of popular social bookmarking sites like Digg, the data files made for some pretty good digging.
The incident (you can get details in this blog post)happened at the beginning of February and traffic continued pretty strong through the end of the month. It ended up being covered on several hundred blogs, dozens of forums, a few online news outlets and various social bookmarking sites. It even made the front page of Digg without a few hours of my blog post going up. It also got the National Pork Board absolutely buried in angry phone calls and emails.
There was no doubting the traffic that would end up showing up...a total of about 80K unique visitors for the month of February. That's four times the usual monthly traffic for the blog prior to the incident.
The question was, how valuable was all that social media exposure?
This is the question that Matt was looking to answer as he dug into my log files last month.
The important thing to note is that he not only looked at traffic levels, he also looked at engagement rates. Here's what he had to say about them:
One of the best ways of analyzing visitors is not to get distracted by the big numbers. When building comparisons from referrers, one has to look at the goals of the site. Especially for content producers, making the site "sticky" has to be defined. What makes a successful visit, even if there is no conversion? Any site manager should have to answer that question, as a good customer experience is what makes people come back, even if they do not purchase or become a lead on the first visit. Chances are they won’t. So how do you know if you are taking care of your visitors? This is where engagement metrics are so important.
First, define engagement. Define a successful visit to your website. A combination of time on site and pages viewed were the logical choices for this project, as Jennifer writes a content-based blog. She does sell shirts (which got her in trouble in the first place), so that as a conversion as well, even though it is not her primary activity.
He also digs into the phenomenon of long-term linking by taking a look at the sites that linked to me during the pork fiasco and tracking to see what type of long term traffic (and additional links) they supplied. From it, we found that there is true long-term value in the long tail of site referrers.
However, one of the more exciting things noted in the analysis was from the blog and forum referrers who sent traffic from the initial visit link. As time went on, those referrers tended to link to Jennifer’s site again and again, especially as she broke new stories specific to the parenting and breastfeeding communities.
This is the critical long-term data observation.
The Lactivist Blog attracted attention from a wide variety of sources, yet the primary message is breastfeeding rights, parenting, and activism. Those blogs and forums, specific to that audience, that initially found her site from the Pork Board suit, continued to link to her site because it was relevant to their message and audience.
The full article is long, but very interesting. It's also full of some nice charts and graphs for you visually minded folks.
Overall, it serves as further proof that while social media can give your site a link and traffic boost, it's old school style marketing and proper link placement that results in engaged users and conversions.
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