Comments on: Social Media Or PPC For Traffic?

By: John Cass

John Cass — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 03:44:37 +0000

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.

By: David Wilson

David Wilson — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 21:25:58 +0000

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

By: Adam Snider

Adam Snider — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 18:37:21 +0000

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.

By: University Update - WWE - Social Media Or PPC For Traffic?

University Update - WWE - Social Media Or PPC For Traffic? — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 17:55:19 +0000

[...] Wimbledon Link to Article wwe Social Media Or PPC For Traffic? » Posted at – Social Media Optimization on Thursday, July 05, 2007 Social Media Or PPC For Traffic? Interesting social media traffic experiment by Marketing Experiments called Harnessing Social Media – Web 2 … , ABC, chat rooms WWE Blogs TVGasm American Idol Blog Results: Over the 12 months, social media View Entire Article » [...]

By: Daniel Riveong

Daniel Riveong — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 17:30:55 +0000

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.