With today’s prevalence of social media websites, many companies are starting to rely on these sites as a major source of visitors. Some of the larger social media websites, such as Digg and StumbleUpon, are known to send tens of thousands of visitors in a single day to a website. The problem is that visitors from these sites usually bounce off right away. Figure 2-8 shows the social media traffic Invesp.com received for a particular story. Traffic from StumbleUpon had a bounce rate of 83% with an average time spent of 18 seconds. The average time a visitor spends on Invesp.com is 1:53.
Focusing on bounce rate caused usability expert Jakob Nielsen to describe social media traffic as low-value referrers with the following characteristics:
…People arriving through these sources are notoriously fickle and are probably not in your target audience. You should expect most of them to leave immediately, once they’ve satisfied their idle curiosity. Consider any value derived from Digg and its like as pure gravy; don’t worry if this traffic source has a sky-high bounce rate.[18]
Stan Schroeder published an article on Mashable.com discussing the value of social media websites:
Yes, Digg or Reddit or StumbleUpon users will swarm to your page, probably won’t click on anything else, they’ll probably stay only a couple of seconds, and there’s no way in hell you can convert them to buy anything. This is true. Angry website owners have often described such users as lazy bums with a short attention span; I think it’s simply because they’re smart and they don’t want to waste time. When I’m on Digg, I don’t want to waste time either; I want to read and see the stuff that really interests me, and move on.[19]
With most of our clients, social media sites never convert. Unless your website uses the number of visitors as a KPI to drive revenue, thousands of visitors are meaningless and have no real business value to you. You should evaluate these sources of traffic based on your established KPIs. For an ecommerce website, evaluate the conversion rate and average order value for visitors from these sites.
At this point, you may be wondering: is social media useless or of no value from a conversion perspective?
Not necessarily. How well a website ranks for a certain keyword depends on the number of inbound links it receives from other websites. Even if most social traffic never converts, usually visitors within that traffic are genuinely interested in your story. These interested visitors will likely link to you. These links can provide you with a higher ranking within search engines and drive traffic that actually converts. The other value in social media websites is engagement. Social media traffic allows you to converse with a community interested in what you have to offer.