Sep 24, 2009 - Comments: 0

Twitter vs. the Long Tail

Posted by Heidi Strom Moon under Analytics , CDG & Clients

Every week, I get a Google Analytics report containing key metrics for this blog. Scanning through the data is a great way to get insights into who's coming here and why.

Blog traffic spike

Usually our numbers don't vary vastly from week to week. Our trends are more incremental than astronomic.

Until earlier this month, that is.

On Sept. 1, I wrote a post about "The 5 People You'll Meet on Twitter" and shared it on Twitter -- then was gratified to see the URL being re-tweeted over the next few days. As a result, our traffic temporarily went through the roof.

While the uptick in numbers was fun to watch, even more interesting was seeing what happened next.

The following week, we returned to our usual levels, which provided an interesting point of comparison -- in fact, you could call it Twitter vs. the Long Tail.

During the Twitter Week, our visitors and page views shot up by orders of magnitude: several hundred percent. Referring sites -- primarily from Twitter -- became the biggest source of traffic, leaving search engines in the dust. Most visitors, not too surprisingly, were new, rather than our usual mix of new and returning. And the top content was the re-tweeted post.

But the time on site tanked, down over 73%. And our bounce rate worsened by 33%.

Cut to the next week, back to normal. Visitors and total page views, way down. But time on site? Up 320%. Average page views up 67%. Bounce rate improved by 16%.

Most tellingly, search engines as a percentage of traffic sources shot back up by 700%. And our top content wasn't a single post, but several posts, many of them from weeks and months ago.

From this small data review, here are a few of our takeaways:

  • Twitter is a great driver of short-term traffic. But those visitors are more likely to be less engaged. Transforming these new visitors into repeat, engaged visitors is a bigger challenge.
  • We get more repeat traffic over a longer period of time from a handful of posts, some newer and some older, on certain key topics -- including Facebook privacy controls, Facebook for business and Google Analytics. The long tail of search continues to work for us, sending visitors who stay longer and read more (translation: more engaged).
  • We will continue to test ways of promoting (what we hope is) valuable content through both Twitter and organic search.
What do your analytics reports tell you? Are you more succesful with short-term traffic drivers or the long tail of search?

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