Digg + Facebook = The Most Loyal Readers, Social Sites Send Fewer, but More Loyal Visitors than Search

While we all - Marketers like our sites to have a Lot of visitors, but also loyal and repeat visitors, - one who returns for later visits is especially valuable. And while search engines do send a lot of visitors, a study issued by Chitika earlier this month shows that the most loyal site visitors come from social sites, as eMarketer reports. The study, based on a sample of 33 million unique users across the Chitika publisher network in September, 2009, compared the number of visitors coming from major traffic sources – Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Digg, Facebook, and Twitter – to the number of times those visitors came back to the referred site. If a visitor came to the site four or more times over the course of a week, that visitor was considered a “loyal” user, They found that Facebook and Digg had the best loyalty rates.

The results showed that Facebook was far and away the best provider of loyal users - over 20% of all visitors from Facebook visited the referred site four or more times per week. Digg came in second place with slightly over 16%

Interestingly, Next came the search engines, Yahoo! leading the way with over 15% of referrals being loyal. Google and Bing were practically even at slightly below 12%, and Twitter came in last place overall with barely over 11%.

Yahoo had a slightly better loyalty rate than Google, While Google naturally wins in sheer numbers,

So if a website owner can drive a thousand people to their site via Google, or they can drive the same number via Facebook, if you want loyalty, Facebook is a better bet.

It’s also interesting that Twitter visitors were least loyal. You might argue that links in Twitter get pushed down in the feed so fast that it’s hard to dig them up again later to return, but the same is probably true for Facebook. (Note, too, that Twitter is falling rapidly in referral rates: eMarketer says, “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.”)

Still, social media sites are only sending a tiny fraction of traffic. An earlier Chitika Study concluded that “the overwhel

ming dominance of search engines is facing little, if any, threat from social networks.”

The company 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%.

What do you think? Do you see more loyal visitors from Digg and Facebook? Have you seen a change in your visitors from Digg?

jay singer

internet marketing consultant & mentor

www.jay4wealth.com