A new report from Hitwise is showing that as more time online is spent inside social networks, e-commerce sites are receiving less traffic from search (both natural and paid) and more from social networks. They found that for UK online retailers, the amount of traffic they received from paid search listings fell from 10.1% in March 2008 to 8.9% in March 2009; meanwhile the amount of traffic these sites are receiving from social networks has increased from 5.2% to 7.1% over the same time period.
A similar shift has happened from webmail providers to social networks; whereas a year ago the traffic they generated for e-commerce sites was roughly equal, Hitwise now reports that social networks are generating 58.3% more traffic that webmail providers.
With the UK (and the rest of the world) in a downturn, margins for online retailers are being squeezed, and reducing the cost per acquisition has never been more important. Companies are now showing that it’s possible to generate effective traffic from the social networks, which if done right is far cheaper than paid search; ASOS, the online fashion retailer, is receiving over 13% of its traffic from Facebook alone. Brands which get this right will be have a cheaper CPA and better margins than their competitors, giving an essential edge in this climate.
(Data sourced from Hitwise Intelligence).
Grant Bell general ASOS, ecommerce, facebook, hitwise, online retailers, PPC, search, social networks, traffic generation, upstream traffic
Facebook have been making a number of additions to their ‘public profiles’ recently (what used to be called fan pages); the latest of which is to add viral invites to pages, as
All Facebook report. This means that a fan of a public profile can send direct invites to their friends, similar to applications. The effect of this won’t be dramatic, as if people really wanted to share a page with their friends they could do it with the share feature, however this could be a stronger call to action for users; and it’s certainly something which brand owners of pages have been calling for.
admin facebook news facebook, facebook marketing, fan pages, public profiles, social network marketing, social networks
According to a new Nielsen Online report, Facebook now has a 47% reach in the UK, the Guardian reports. Together, member communities (made up of blogs and social networks) are the fourth most popular web destination in the UK - ahead of personal email. They’ve grown over 10% in the last year.
However, UK penetration is dwarfed by Brazil - the Google owned social network Orkut has a 70% penetration there, the highest social network penetration of any of the countries in the Nielsen survey.
Brazil is also top in time spent on these sites - 23% of all time spent (1 in 4 minutes), followed closely by the UK with 17% of all time spent online (1 in 6 minutes).
This shows how far social networks have come in terms of personal use - however also points out that despite the seemingly world dominating growth of Facebook, it’s not the total solution if you’re aiming for a global audience.
admin general brazil, facebook, orkut, social networks, uk