Really interesting research data from ad network Chitika, via eMarketer on the quality of visitors from social networking sites.
The Chitika study looked at the quality of traffic from search engines and social networks, and the results were a little surprising. According to Chitika, social sites Facebook and Digg are more likely to send returning traffic to your web site than search engines such as Yahoo!, Google and Bing.
More than one-fifth of users referred to a site by Facebook visited at least four times in the course of a week. Less than 12% of Google-referred visitors were as loyal, about the same percentage as Twitter.
But before you drop that search campaign and jump into Digg, Chitikia had released some earlier data in September that showed that social media sites are only sending a tiny fraction of traffic. Basically Chitikia looked at the top sites sending traffic to the publishers in its network and found that Google alone accounted for 76.13% of referrals. Taken together, search engines made almost 98% of all referrals, while social networking sites made up just 0.55%.
That Chitika Study concluded that
“the overwhelming dominance of search engines is facing little, if any, threat from social networks.”
Interestingly, Twitter again scored low in this survey. In July, Twitter was No. 24 on Chitika’s list of top referrers, with 0.05%. By September, it had moved down to 44th place, with just a 0.02% share. Has Twitter peaked?
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