Social media drives better prospects to websites: the quality-of-visit difference
A huge plus to internet marketing is the insightful data available. Studying Google Analytics statistics for two websites this week, Randy discovered something fascinating and powerful about social media: its value for bringing much better prospects to websites.
An Aside: The Google “doodles” here are eye candy. Google shares a lot of them on their website, plus “fan logos.” What happened to logos locked in for decades? Google changes everything.
Now, back to our powerful social media discovery based on Google Analytics stats…
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The quality-of-visit question for website traffic
If you had a choice between…
1. Hundreds of visitors (maybe 1000s!) to your site who stayed only a brief time and “bounced” off at a high rate… or
2. Many fewer visitors who stayed 14 times longer and bounced at 1/3 the rate of the average visitor…
Which would you prefer? We go for #2, opting for QUALITY of visits versus Quantity of visits. Lets see what Google Analytics stats show…
Two examples of website visits from social media
B-to-B EXAMPLE. Reviewing Google Analytics stats for our website for the past month, the referrals from LinkedIn jumped out as exceptional. While there were only 18 visitors from LinkedIn posts, their interest soared above the average visitor. Compare these two:
Our GENERIC STATS on all traffic (1 mo. 377 visits)
- pages/visit: 1.98 avg.
- time on site: 1:39 avg.
- bounce rate: 71.4% avg.
Our LINKEDIN referrals (18 visits)
- pages/visit: 11.2 avg. (more pages is better)
- time on site: 18:26 avg. (more time is better)
- bounce rate: 27.78% avg. (lower %age is better)
Of course you have to be active and ‘appropriate‘ on social media in the first place. We’ve seen this social media referral phenomenon before for other sites, including from Facebook. There can be a huge QUALITY advantage for links from social media. We’ll take these kinds referrals from social media any day. Quality trumps quantity for most of our clients.
B-to-C EXAMPLE. Here’s another example, this time for Facebook, for award-winning client Master Remodelers. We launched their first Facebook page a month ago and are slowly building an audience. (one month stats)
Their GENERIC STATS on all traffic (406 visits)
- pages/visit: 4.15 avg.
- time on site: 5:16 avg.
- bounce rate: 42.6% avg.
Their FACEBOOK referrals (27 visits)
- pages/visit: 10.2 avg.
- time on site: 20:23 avg.
- bounce rate: 14.8% avg.
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Facebook Bonus #1: A new feature of Facebook is stats on visitors age and sex, for example, not available with Google Analytics. Here’s an example of that insight we’ve never had before…
Facebook Bonus #2: Another nice feature Facebook gives you—as an administrator—is the number of “impressions” for each post. This helps with better targeting of social media marketing strategies in the future, including for blogs on the website.
I like the addition of the social media statistics (to the Master Remodelers monthly Internet report), which is a new feature from Facebook. You , Randy, are the first to use it in a report that I’ve seen. Good job. Keep up the progress.—Bob Stein, Manager of IT Programs, Pitt SBDC
A question for readers…
What do you think is the reason for this discrepancy in behavior between average website visitors and those from social media? We think it’s all about TRUST—an extension of ‘word of mouth.’ Give us a piece of your mind on this…
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