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

Its very important to keep track of your blogs statistics, traffic source , analyse your blog growth and for this I would suggest your use Google Analytics, which is the best and free system available. I use this for all my websites and get all the information that I need to know and this helps me in improving my blog traffic. With Google analytics your can find the traffic source, like if its from a particular site or search engines or from your Google adwords campaign or any other sources. If its search engine, you can find the keywords that your page ranked for and the number of visits or pageviews that you got from that particular keyword. You can even find information like the Location of the visitor, bounce rate, the time that the visitor spent on your website, the pages that the visitor visited during that visit, the location of the visitor, returning visitor, loyalty of the visitor, operating system that the visitor is using, the browser used by the visitor and tons of other information. These things are very important information that you need to have about your blog so that you can tune your blog for improving your traffic.

I was just going through the reports at Google Analytics and wondering about my blog traffic at this blog and found that 79% of my visitors are from referring sites. Which means that some site has my links posted and the visitor has clicked that like and came to this blog. I have very less visitors from search engines, reason is that this is a new blog and to get listed in search engine and getting top ranking for popular keywords will take some time. This blog does not have a Pagerank yet as its just started last month. I am not worried about search engine traffic as I am well aware how much time it takes to get ranked in search engine, but I still get traffic from search engines which is really a good sign for me.

Now I would just like to compare the traffic information of one of my other blog which has about 51% of the traffic from search engines. This blog is a bit old blog as well and has a fairly good pagerank. 41% of the traffic is from referring site. In fact the statistics of this blog was very different 1 month back. I never used social networking sites like stumbleupon or digg, but some visitor did submit some of my pages to these social networking sites and the statistics of my blog started changing. Earlier 85% of my traffic was from search engines and the remaining from other sources. This shows that Social Networking sites can really change the statistics of your blog. But there are some issues using social networking sites for traffic and many experts say that Social networking traffic and just waste of bandwidth. The conversion rate from these sites are very low. I will come up with a post after a detailed study on this topic

I regularly visit Digg, and keep myself updated about the latest news and stories. Recently during the pagerank update, I searched for some latest information about pagerank update, but could not find any latest digged stories. Is there any problem with the search functionality with Digg?

First I typed pagerank in the search box of Digg and I got these results

The results were old pages, so I changed the sort to sort newest

This was again showing old pages, but with some difference

Opps, I was just not checking the other filters, I had selected “Front Page Stories”

So I just again changed the filter to “All Stories”

Yes now I got the ones what I wanted. I think these are new filters added in Digg. So the search is fully functional

Recently I had noticed that there were lots of duplicate posts coming up at digg

Digg usually checks for submitted pages and asks the user to Digg instead of submitting it? may be a bug

Digg is a very popular site where you can submit interesting content with a small snippet which will finally link to the original page. Every submitted story can be digged (Voted) or buried by registered digg users. What I see interesting about digg is that its totally controlled by the users and everything by human. We see latest happenings faster than search engines. We get results of the searched key phrases from a search engine but in digg, you can view upcoming stories and fresh news on the world wide web.

History of Digg

Digg was started Kevin Rose in September 2004 who developed an algorithm to allow web users to control and promote content from other sites on a single site without any external editorial control. He then added features like social networking which created real commercial value for the site. Digg now has a very small number of staff working, about 40. Kevin’s investment for this site was just a mere US$1000.

Great Success…