Search Versus Social: Analysis of One Blog's Traffic Sources

Earlier this morning Fred Wilson published an interesting comparison of his blog’s traffic sources where upon splitting “the top ten” referrers “into three categories”, he discovered the following breakdown:

  • Direct — 50%
  • Social — 40% (with nearly 1/2 from StumbleUpon)
  • Search — 10%

These numbers amused me to say the least, and I decided to perform a quick analysis my own blog’s traffic sources over the past 30 days.

As expected, my situation is quite different:

  • Search — 72%
  • Direct — 13.3%
  • Social — 8.1%

I suspect most blogs will see a breakdown more similar to mine than the one that Fred is witnessing now. But that’s only my guess, and I would love to hear from other bloggers on this one.

I’ve also analyzed my top social media sources, and here’s what I see:

Top 7 Social Media Referrers

4.5% — t.co
1.6% — facebook.com
0.8% — twitterfeed
0.5% — linkedin.com
0.3% — stumbleupon.com
0.2% — bizsugar.com
0.2% — hootsuite.com

I guess, I should get more active on StumbleUpon. Fred’s figures are truly compelling.

Finally, I’ve decided to measure what role news aggregation sites are playing in my blog’s traffic (I could’ve included these in the “social” category too, but on a number of reasons decided to single them out), and it appears that they are referring just a bit less than 3% of all my visitors. Here’s a breakdown of what I see in my case:

Top 3 News Aggregators Sources

1.7% — affbuzz.com
0.5% — affdaily.com
0.3% — marketingland.com

What are you seeing on your blog(s)? What social channels do you see perform most effectively? And how effective is social in your case?

3 thoughts on “Search Versus Social: Analysis of One Blog's Traffic Sources”

  1. That is pretty incredible that he was able to generate so much traffic from StumbleUpon. I really like using that bookmarking site, but I haven’t heard of someone having that much success with it before. I’d be interested to know if there is a particular way Fred Wilson goes about leveraging that resource. Thanks for the interesting article.

  2. Robert, Christelle, thank you for your comments. Yes, those were quite incredible numbers. Apparently he is creating some amazingly viral content.

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