A VC - Latest Comments in The Power Of Passed Links

Re: The Power Of Passed Links

Kevin C. — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 23:44:43 -0000

I am trying to determine the value of a twitter link and the multiplication effect of many twitter followers? I don't see a high conversion rate right now, but it is free and a typical twitter account grows far faster than facebook. With the new apps, you can post on all three with a simple tweet.

Re: The Power Of Passed Links

fredwilson — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:36:21 -0000

Thanks. I'll check it out

Re: The Power Of Passed Links

Mayank Sharma — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 07:13:26 -0000

Fred, I have linked this article to a blog post of mine which talks about the accuracy of the statistics provided by link shortening services such as bit.ly. Here is the link. http://zebugroup.com/blog/2009/06/link-tracking-lies-damn-lies-statistics/. I have used this blog post of yours as a reason for a shift from google sending traffic to your site to social media sending the traffic.

Re: The Power Of Passed Links

underdown — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 14:13:28 -0000

Sorry fred, big fan of your site btw. Of course I have investors and partners on my sites so sharing data is not within my rights. So that leaves two possibilities (false dichotomy?) I'm either a troll or someone with access to data that found it shocking to see this mentioned on a site I frequent. I'll leave it to you to judge. GL

Re: The Power Of Passed Links

fredwilson — Sun, 17 May 2009 09:41:08 -0000

I agree. Good products and services will do well with social media. Bad ones can try as hard as they can and won't get far

Re: The Power Of Passed Links

Brendan Piper — Sat, 16 May 2009 16:44:20 -0000

great read, always like seeing someone brining metrics into the fuzzy science of "Social Media"

Re: The Power Of Passed Links

Doug Schumacher — Sat, 16 May 2009 15:03:20 -0000

Fred,

Really like this entire thread.

Creativity will certainly become a premium, imo. I recently spoke at the Facebook Global Sales Conference on the increasing demand for creativity in social media. But social media is much more challenging that paid media. Even bad paid media drives traffic and some sales, whereas bad social media is problematic.

Social media-oriented marketing is attempting to get a more committed involvement from the consumer, and so it has to reach them at a deeper level. And that requires a much deeper understanding of their wants, needs, desires, technologies, etc, than getting them to laugh at a :30 spot. So while creativity should be getting a good bump in the coming years, I think it's going to be closely tied to strategic planning, and it's ability to get the whole process headed in the right direction.

http://www.dougschumacher.c...

Re: The Power Of Passed Links

fredwilson — Thu, 14 May 2009 10:25:40 -0000

Thanks! This is super helpful

Re: The Power Of Passed Links

lawrence coburn — Tue, 12 May 2009 21:33:17 -0000

Fred, I share some more stats on passed links from our site here:

http://www.sexywidget.com/m...

Re: The Power Of Passed Links

Mike Evans — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 15:06:00 -0000

I"m seeing more and more evidence that this has a lot to do with segmentation. On our site, we've got channelized survey responses that say it isn't Email or Facebook sourced transactions, but Mass Transit advertising transactions that yield the best results. A deeper dive into our survey data shows that it has most to do with the demographics of the group seeing those ads vs other channels.

Linking the behavior of the demo to facebook is the right way to go about creating actionable items from this data.

Re: The Power Of Passed Links

fredwilson — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 09:55:43 -0000

We don't think so and have discussed it at length

The investors in tumblr (USV and Spark) are also investors in twitter

Re: The Power Of Passed Links

Seenator — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 09:39:01 -0000

Then you may have a conflict (Twitter/Tumblr) in your portfolio :)

Re: The Power Of Passed Links

fredwilson — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 09:31:32 -0000

Blogger plus indentity plus follow plus engagement is called tumblr

Re: The Power Of Passed Links

Seenator — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 09:27:44 -0000

Fred,

I am a bit late to this post but to me there is a big difference between Twitter and Blogging and that is COMMUNITY i.e. a feeling of interconnectedness.

The community comes from three main parts:
Follow
@ Replies
# Hash Tags

If and when Ev had invented Blogger and he had built an identity that could follow each other, friend each other etc, then perhaps it would come closer to Twitter. Its the same issue with Wordpress.

Although LiveJournal and Facebook's Notes features come closer to Twitter than a generic Blogger and Wordpress platform.

I am sure there is one more way to look at this but thats how I am trying to wrap my head around this.

Re: The Power Of Passed Links

fredwilson — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 08:54:17 -0000

Ben

I posted this in its entirety just now

Its just too good to stay behind the comment link

I linked out to your linkedin profile

Happy to replace that link with something else if you'd like

Thanks again

Re: The Power Of Passed Links

fredwilson — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 06:44:16 -0000

Wow, wow, wow

This is a fucking great comment. Its a blog post in its own right. Can I reblog it in its entirety?

Re: The Power Of Passed Links

Ben Straley — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 04:02:03 -0000

Hi Fred. This is a really interesting conversation you’ve started. I wish I could have jumped in sooner.
Following are a few more data points and comments I want to add to the discussion:
1. Recap of a Hitwise study published on DMNews - Visits from Facebook are greater than visits from Google on a few major sites across several verticals: http://www.dmnews.com/Faceb... Are sharing and “social discovery” more important sources of traffic than search in certain verticals? Is this a harbinger of things to come across a larger swath of Web sites?
2. The average % of traffic from passed links varies considerably by vertical. We suspect some of this is due to the demographics of the audience on a given site. Also, the content found in some verticals is just much more likely to get passed along than in others. For example, we see % of traffic from shared links on games sites well into the 25-40% range. Sites/campaigns that promote strong offers also receive a significant % of their traffic from shared links - in the 20-30% range. In contrast, B2B sites with more static content receive a far lesser benefit from shared links – somewhere in the 3-7% range.
3. This is closely related to point 2 above. Content matters most of all. If you’ve got good content and make it easy for people to link to it, it will be shared and attract a lot of visitors. We’ve seen this work over and over. We tracked the pass-along of links pointing to two campaigns running concurrently for the same product (different micro-sites). One of them had a good offer but so-so content while the other campaign had great (funny) content with no offer. The % of unique visitors generated by the pass-along of links to the good offer was under 10% while the traffic from the pass-along of the links to the good content was over 40%. The campaign with good content also got significantly more traffic overall. What data like this suggests is that the prediction you make in your deck about dollars shifting from media to content is a really good one in my opinion. As marketers compete for the attention and interest of their audience, the best way to do this is through content that’s delivered to them via their social graph. This already happens if the content’s good. There just isn’t enough of it.
4. We haven’t looked at this yet but I’m extremely curious to know what ,if any, correlation there is between the number (or %) of visitors from passed links and the number (or %) of visitors from organic search 30-60 days later or however long it takes for the search bots to update their indices. It stands to reason there’s a positive correlation between the two metrics but we haven’t done the number crunching yet. Could traffic from shared links be an early indicator of improved SEO performance given the proliferation of back links?
5. The strawman you’ve built above is a good stab at an analytical framework for estimating the absolute value of shared links. I think it makes sense to take it a few steps further. If I’m an online marketer paying an eCPM/eCPC/eCPA for some % of traffic to my site and conversions (if I’m doing direct response), then I’m probably also encouraging people to pass-along links via Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc. While the reach of the latter set of activities is no doubt lower than what I can reasonably expect to obtain from a paid media campaign, I should also expect that the eCPC/eCPA for shared links is much, much lower due to consistently higher click-through and conversion rates for these links. So, as I think about how to optimize the performance of my campaign, I need to be thinking about how I should be shifting dollars within as well as across these very different but complementary sets of activities. Also, my paid media can stimulate pass-along which should be factored into my calculations of the true ROI of my advertising campaign. We’re still pulling the data on this which I’ll share as soon as we have it.
6. In most cases where traffic and conversions from shared links are high, we see a HUGE amount of activity driven initially by vertically-oriented blogs and community forums before it goes “mass social” by making its way up to Facebook for example. In calculating true value of shared links, it’s important to factor in the niche sites and communities in your vertical. The numbers might be relatively small but their significance huge. In one case, we saw a niche site send several hundred visitors to a marketer’s campaign micro-site in a 2-week period. This placed that referring site well down the list of top-referrers (something like #25). Not very interesting. But using our sharing tracking and measurement technology, our customer watched as the visitors from that niche site drove well over fourteen thousand additional visitors to the campaign micro-site via links shared in email, IM, on blogs, forums, and, of course, Facebook etc. Niche sites matter.
7. Meteor Solutions hasn’t been in business long enough to have longitudinal data to do trend analysis yet. However, we do see sites/campaigns that cater to a younger audience receive a higher percentage of their traffic from shared links. (See my comment about games sites above) When I take a step back and look at my own behavior, I also have a hard time denying the fact that my media consumption habits and behaviors have changed in the last 18-24 months. I’m getting more and more of my information from the people I’m connected to through email, IM, RSS, Facebook, and Twitter. Also, the nature of the searching I’m doing now is much more targeted and specific. I won’t search as much for content or something that’s happening now because I’ve probably already received the link from someone I know or follow. The links that are relevant to me and timely find their way to me these days with remarkable efficiency.
8. The most popular mode of sharing we see is email (25% of visits from passed links come from links shared through email), followed by blogs (18% of visits from passed links come from links shared through blogs), video sharing sites (14% of visits from passed links come from links shared through video sharing sites like YouTube), and forums/message boards (11% of visits from passed links come from links shared through forums and message boards). Social networks account for around 9% of the traffic from shared links. I pulled these stats from our Meteor Tracker data which does not yet contain a representative sample of sites of varying sizes across all verticals. It isn’t yet representative of the Web as a whole.

Re: The Power Of Passed Links

Joe Lazarus — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 21:51:21 -0000

Agreed. Mainstream consumers are becoming more comfortable with the
idea of sharing links with friends & followers every day. It's also
becoming increasingly difficult for companies in more traditional
sectors to grow traffic unless they offer something worth sharing. The
days of paid traffic plus SEO / email spam are dwindling.

Re: The Power Of Passed Links

Phillip Baker — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 21:25:15 -0000

They're both publishing tools and I guess that ultimately it depends how the tools are used. But I think the character limit, the follow system and the centralization of Twitter do produce something different. It's more about people than posts which are more disposable, I see it as more communication than publishing. I've written about it here: http://bit.ly/16Obmu, and in a few other posts.

In terms of passing links, the sole reason for a tweet could be to post a (single) link and I think that in itself creates something different. Whatever the other characters are used for, the message in those tweets is "look at this link". Blog posts can be just as explicit but links tend to be used more as references.

I'd be very curious to know if conversion rates for Twitter links and blog links differ.

Re: The Power Of Passed Links

fredwilson — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 20:53:13 -0000

This is great feedback Joe

I think you are right that my data is skewed in favor of earned media but it may just be a matter of time before you start seeing these trends show up in more traditional sectors

Re: The Power Of Passed Links

Joe Lazarus — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 20:29:27 -0000

I manage online marketing for a number of businesses across a bunch of different verticals. While I can't share specific data from my clients, I'm seeing many of these same trends. Here are a few additional thoughts / comments...

Google is the top traffic driver for most sites. As with your data, my clients see the largest % of traffic from search, but it's often a much larger % than your data suggests relative to earned media.

Facebook & Twitter are growing quickly as a traffic source. That's generally true across the board, but the % of traffic from those sites is far lower for most of the sites I've studied.

The % of traffic from earned media varies wildly by site. I imagine you're seeing a larger % from earned media due to the nature of the companies in your portfolio, which tend to be Web 2.0 businesses with early adopters who are more likely to use social media sites than more "traditional" online businesses (ex. Etsy probably sees a much higher % of traffic from earned media than eBay, but I don't have data on either of those companies). I also notice that earned media is a bigger traffic driver for sites that are more dependent on timely, urgent content (ie. people are more likely to share & click links through earned media for an Etsy item that could be out of stock tomorrow or for a breaking news story vs. a television purchase or vacation guide).

Email typically includes high value retention segments. Your definition of email... "a passed link sent via email from one friend to another"... is often only a small portion of email referral traffic. Outbound email marketing (ex. Etsy newsletters sent from the company, not our friends) can account for a large portion of that traffic and it tends to convert really well since those are loyal customers who subscribed to company emails.

Facebook is cannibalizing online email, particularly for the youth segment. I've seen a number of studies that suggest that young people use Facebook not just to send links to groups of friends, but also as a replacement to email (ie. they send a link to just one friend using Facebook email). Many of the people under 25 that I talk to tell me that they only use email to communicate with companies and old people... otherwise it's Facebook email, IM, etc. Twitter direct messages are also an email replacement. My hunch is that 1:1 communication through social sites converts much better than group communication blasts.

Navigational queries skew Google conversion. Typically, the most popular search terms for any business AND the ones that convert best are navigational searches on the company's brand name (ex. loyal customers search Google for "etsy" as a way to navigate to that site). Often, if you separate navigational queries from other search terms, the volume and conversion metrics tell a different story.

As always, thanks for sharing the data and your analysis. Maybe your friends at Comscore can provide a more complete view across a broader range of sites.

Re: The Power Of Passed Links

fredwilson — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 19:46:26 -0000

bitte

Re: The Power Of Passed Links

Mark Essel — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 18:48:33 -0000

Danka shern

Re: The Power Of Passed Links

fredwilson — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 18:11:18 -0000

I've always seen twittering and blogging as essentially the same thing.

It's just that twittering is easier because the message lengths are short.

I took to twittering because it was the exact same experience for me as blogging

Re: The Power Of Passed Links

fredwilson — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 15:27:26 -0000

Yes, I think so