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Flash Survey: Your Social Traffic Revenue

The Question:

How much of your site’s revenue comes from social traffic?

The Results:

Analysis of Results:

When we reviewed the data from this week’s Flash Survey we were surprised that nearly half of respondents reported that 0-5% of revenue came from social channels. This prompted us to compare these responses to conversion data collected by Spring Metrics. The comparison told an even more interesting story. In our sample of real-world data from a variety of ecommerce sites, 90% of sites had less than 1% of their revenue coming from social channels. This is considerably less than our respondents self-reported and it reveals an important truth: social media channels are making a limited impact on the bottom line for most sites.

Known Unknowns
Also interesting: our Flash Survey revealed that 18% of respondents didn’t know how much of their site’s revenue came by way of social traffic. Luckily, this knowledge gap can be bridged by using a conversion analytics tool like Spring Metrics to understand just how many conversions can be attributed to social media—and also, how much revenue is associated with those social conversions.

Balancing Expenses and Revenues
So what does this mean for you? If you’re one of the sites that’s seeing limited revenue from social traffic, there remains a bright side: the performance of your social media channel can be improved! By targeting new social users, and by encouraging your existing users to evangelize your brand on social media, you can leverage the full potential of this channel. That said, given the limited impact of social traffic as reported above, you should carefully weigh your investments in this area.