Social Media Or PPC For Traffic?
Interesting social media traffic experiment by Marketing Experiments called Harnessing Social Media - Web 2.0 Grows Up - Free Internet Traffic. What premise of the year-long experiment was whether social media sites could a substantial amount of “free” traffic to four web sites over the 12 months. They then compared this traffic with the cost of buying traffic via Google AdWords to see which one had the best ROI.
To handle the social media tactics Marketing Experiments hired someone at $10 an hour. Throughout the year this person spent 360 hours working on the project posting 255 blog excerpts and attempting “to engage in real and meaningful conversation with the community”.
Social Media Sites Targeted:
Some of the social media sites targeted included:
- Myspace
- YouTube
- Google Video
- Wikipedia
- Fark
- imBored
- Hi5
- Google Groups
- Craigslist
- Digg
- Delicious
- iVillage
- NY Times Blog
- MTV, NBC, ABC, chat rooms
- WWE Blogs
- TVGasm
- American Idol Blog
Results:
Over the 12 months, social media tactics were able to generate 93,207 unique visitors to their site sites, putting the costs per visitor at less than $0.04 per visitor. There are very few other traffic driving tactics that can drive traffic at this kind of cost. By comparison they were able to drive 2,047 total users, spending $1,250 with Google Adwords
| Total Visitors | Total Cost | Cost Per Visit | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Social Media Optimization | 93,207 | $3,600 | 4¢ |
| Google Adwords | 2,057 | $1,250 | 61¢ |
What you need to understand: Social Media Optimization yielded 1,427% greater return on our investment.
Summary:
Based on our initial research, it appears that while actually generating free viral traffic online requires creativity and patience, creating an SMO strategy can be a very worthwhile investment.
My Questions:
This is a very interesting study that once again shows that social media tactics can generate significant amounts of traffic to your web site. However, I don’t think you can compare a 12 month social media experiment with a 30 day PPC campaign and say that Social Media Optimization yielded 1,427% greater return on our investment.
Also, while Marketing Experiments focused on 4 different blogs in four different niche markets the results for the sites were all rolled into one. Did any of the niche sites perform substantially better than any of the others and if so why?
Marketing Experiments identified at least 18 social media sites that they focused on. Which one(s) produced the most qualified traffic?
Filed under Case Studies, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (5) : Jul 5th, 2007
July 5th, 2007 at 1:30 pm
David,
Nice find! In my experience, I’ve seen similar happenings where traffic is a lot cheaper on the social media side.
You bring up excellent questions about the study, and another question to add to that list is “But what about quality of traffic?”
I think to think that in *general* Social Media users are more early in the conversion process (they’re browsing and “pogosticking”), while traffic coming in through AdWords are more towards the end of the conversion funnel and more likely to buy in a short period of time compared to SMO traffic.
For Example, Digg users generate tons of traffic, but not necessarily sales (depending on product of course). With my background in SEO, I see value in Digg traffic to help create more links (assuming that Diggers love to blog on what they find on Digg) and for media exposure among a tech-savvy audience (linkerati).
So all in all, depending on the client’s goals - AdWords in alot of ways is still the better choice. But if its about traffic, brand building and SEO - then SMO is probably the way to go.
July 5th, 2007 at 1:55 pm
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July 5th, 2007 at 2:37 pm
I, too, wonder which of those sites brought the most qualified traffic. For example, I can imagine that the American Idol Blog may have brought a large amount of traffic, due to the popularity of the show, but unless any of the blogs that Marketing Experiments focused on American Idol specifically, or music generally, I don’t imagine much (if any) of that traffic would have converted. The same thing could probably be said of the WWE sites, I suspect.
July 5th, 2007 at 5:25 pm
Good points Adam and Daniel. I will ping the folks over at Marketing Experiments and see if I can get some more details on the results.
David
August 7th, 2007 at 11:44 pm
Daniel raises an important issue, its not cpc but cpa that really matters. However, I wonder if Daniel is suggesting using Google Adwords is better than achieving a top ranking on google or another major search engine? Part of the issue with social media is like content development for seo the payback develops over time, though in addition to ranking its through the direct traffic that comes from links and conversation about you.