Who sends the best traffic, John Chow or Digg
BlogStorm has been fortunate enough to have just short of half a million visitors since we launched in June and I thought it would be interesting to take a quick look at which traffic sources have been most valuable so far.
Social media
Digg has been the largest referrer with 229,000 visitors, each spending an average of 18 seconds on the site and looking at 1.13 pages.
StumbleUpon users had a much larger attention span and looked at an average of 1.87 pages in the 1.27 minutes they spent on the site.
The 35,000 reddit users who visited the site spent 27 seconds looking at an average of just 1.23 pages.
Forums
One of the largest traffic sources is the Digital Point Forums with over 7000 visitors. Each visitor spent an average of 3.04 minutes on the site and looked at 2.43 pages – a very good success rate.
Blogs
Getting mentioned on a blog is the best way to build your reputation so its no surprise that my favourite sources of traffic are respected blogs.
It is also very interesting to see that John Chow has sent almost as much traffic as TechCrunch despite John only linking to me once and TechCrunch linking to me twice!
The 1750 Visitors from JohnChow.com viewed an average of 3.16 pages in 4.04 minutes while 2400 TC readers only hung around for just over 2 minutes and looked at just 2.6 pages.
Another valuable traffic source was SEO Book which sent 1200 visitors who stayed for 2.45 minutes and viewed 2.15 pages.
This just goes to show how much a mention on a popular blog is worth and why John can charge so much for a review.
Post category: Marketing, Social Media Tweet
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
Read the 10 comments below, or add your own!
Interesting stats. A question regarding the forums – I’m not familiar with DP. Has that traffic come as a result of links in posts or just your forum signature or something else?
Both, I will write a more detailed post about this tomorrow.
I think this also depends on the quality of the traffic, for some sites social media and blogs do not refer buyers, but rather stubmlers, readers and ad clickers.
The conversion to sales is where you have to question what traffic works best and what it is really worth to you. Some sites will loose money on the ads as they will get traffic, but it may not targeted enough to make a conversion.
What works for bloggers does not always work for the average retailer.
Go ahead and include in the more detailed post what kind of tracking program you are using to keep such detailed stats please.
Let me say that I received a decent traffic from a comment that I made on one of your post here than I did from Digg. It’s a nice revelation about traffic coming from Aaron Wall’s SEOBook.
BTW, congratulations for hitting half a million visitors. I’m looking forward to that figure someday.
Great post. It is interesting to see the sources that brought you the most traffic. I am working to try & build more traffic as well. Did you do any kind of promotions to get the Diggs & stumpleupons? Or did it all occur naturally?
Everything was natural.:)
very interesting, what ur username on DP?
Wonderful stat information. I would like to update one more good source of traffic. It is in.com
There is an option to post a news or a site. I got more than 100 visitors in 2 hours after posting a news in in.com. Please try it out and let me know whether it works for you too.
Cheers..
That is an amazing article, I am in awe of John Chow’s blog and the traffic he gets. So how do I get a cult following, too?