I run websites and have for years. For the last nine years I have been glued to my Google analytics. I have seen my various strategies work or not work and have seen my stats go up and up over the years. My main site www.123notary.com has gone from around 40,000 visitors per month in 2008 to about 180,000 per month in 2015 due to increased quality and several huge successes in social media marketing which by the way did not come over-night!
But, after staring at my stats, and thinking about my recent work on Twitter, I came to the conclusion that there’s more. When I follow 1000 people on Twitter, I normally get an average of three clicks on my site that is linked to my Twitter account. We get tons of traffic to my site daily. However, the click from Twitter is a new click from a new person. I have done ROI analysis reports for my site and established how much a social media click is worth. However, a new click could lead to subsequent clicks and is therefor worth more.
It is virtually impossible to know if these anonymous clicks lead to subsequent clicks. However, my site traffic went up after my new Twitter clicks went up. When clicks to my blog went up, that too helped my site traffic. But, which helped my site traffic more — New clicks or old clicks?
Unfortunately, in analytics, sometimes you just have to guess how much certain metrics are worth. If a new person sees my site, what is the chance they will visit again? I would tend to guess perhaps 5-10% realistically. They must have been somewhat targeted to visit my site in the first place, so if they liked what they saw, they might come back. But, if they did come back, how many subsequent visits might there be? I would guess that someone who likes my site might come back a few times, or if they get hooked then over a hundred times. The average subsequent number of visits for a repeat visitor might be twenty visits. If 10% of my initial new visitors do twenty subsequent visits, then for each 10 new visitors, there would be a total of 30 visits which is why I guestimate that each new visit is worth triple in the ROI value of a regular social media click that is likely to be a recurring click.
My parting words are — if only we could know more detailed facts about each click — or perhaps see a face and a story behind the clicks.