Quality of Social Networking Traffic

I was doing some research on Social Networking Traffic like from Stumbleupon or Digg. Couple of my pages were submitted to Stumbleupon and my traffic really boomed up unexpectedly. I was going through the Google Analytics reports and studying the quality of the Traffic.

What does quality of the traffic means?

Suppose I get a visitor from SU (StumbleUpon) or digg, I found that the visitor hardly spent less than a minute on my website and hardly visited 2-3 pages of my blog. But when I look into a visitor who has come directly to my blog spends 20 minutes and visits about 10-20 pages. I did some googling on this subject and found lots of interesting articles by experts.

Some say even the traffic from search engines are of low quality as they just come to your page and see if they get what they want or just continue with other search results. Looking into this opinion I would like to say is if you have good quality content, the visitor may get impressed and go through other pages and even subscribe to your blog feeds. I usually do this.

My opinion for getting loyal visitors for you blog is to create content which will be useful for your readers and they bookmark your site or link to your posts. I do always link to posts and blogs I like and give the credit to the author. I was reading a post at SEOBOOK which gives some very useful information about the quality of Social Network Traffic

In a post at RandomJabber, the author has described why the social networking traffic sucks. He also feels that the quality of the traffic is very low and of no use for the blog rather than wasting the bandwidth.

One more thing I noticed with Social Networking traffic is the ups and downs in my traffic graph. One fine day, my traffic grows more than 500% and the very next day, it comes back to the same old position. If you do not have a dedicated server, you will even get notice from your hosting company as you may exceed the bandwidth limit. Some sites are down due to such traffic. I would like to recommend this post to be read which is about the results of digging an article called the digg effect

How can a Social Networking Traffic be useful?

If you are selling ads on the basis of impressions then such traffic can be useful for you. Social Networking sites gives you lots of hits, but the conversion or the quality will not be good as I mentioned above. You can sell ads on your blog on the basis of impressions and show your stats to your visitors. My concern about the advertisers is, if they are not happy with the results of the ad campaigns will they renew the purchase? If they are not happy with the CTR or CPA, then they may not be renewing the advertising campaigns. Again the other possibility is that you may get new advertisers who may want to try your advertising program without knowing the results and may use for a month and again they may not be happy with your advertising programs.

My Opinion

• Concentrate of creating good content
• Try to best to provide what your visitors expect from your blog
• Don’t take Social networking traffic as a good growth.
• Track your growth using Google Analytics which will clearly explain you the quality of your traffic