MARLBOROUGH, 10/6/2009 – Nothing makes website owners happier than loyal, repeat users, but it can often be difficult to find them. Now, a study by online ad network Chitika suggests that the two best sources may be Facebook and Digg.
The study, based on a sample of 33 million unique users across the Chitika publisher network in September, 2009, compared the number of visitors coming from major traffic sources – Digg, Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and Twitter – to the number of times those visitors came back to the referred site. If a visitor came to the site four or more times over the course of a week, that visitor was considered a “loyal” user.
The results showed that Facebook was far and away the best provider of loyal users – over 20% of all visitors from Facebook visited the referred site four or more times per week. Digg came in second place with slightly over 16%
Next came the search engines, Yahoo! leading the way with over 15% of referrals being loyal. Google and Bing were practically even at slightly below 12%, and Twitter came in last place overall with barely over 11%.
While Google naturally wins in sheer numbers, if a website owner can drive a thousand people to their site via Google, or they can drive the same number via Facebook, Facebook seems to be the way to go for creating a loyal reader.
The Raw Numbers
| Loyalty by Referring Site: | |
|---|---|
| 20.69% | |
| Digg | 16.09% |
| Yahoo! | 15.89% |
| 11.84% | |
| Bing | 11.74% |
| 11.08% |
About Chitika
Chitika, Inc., is a search-based online advertising network , leading the way in intent-based advertising and search engine insights. With over 60,000 sites and 2 billion monthly impressions, the Chitika network is the pulse of the online world. For more information, visit http://chitika.com
Contact:
Daniel Ruby
Research Director, Online Insights
Chitika, Inc.
+866.441.7203 x966
press@chitika.com
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Heya,Fantastic post, although i’m more fascinated in what will take place out of this google vs facebook social network war. I haven’t found out much news on it recently, which perhaps implies that its not that far off, but i’ve a idea its really going to result in some major improvements to social networks. I think, i’d rather facebook left the battle still in the lead mainly because google’s already big enough, additionally they already hold an excessive amount of data on everybody. I don’t believe that both have the opportunity to exist though, either google’s social network will dominate or absolutely crash. Just what does anyone else feel?
I must admit I was surprised by this statistic. My assessment was that Google has more loyal customers, but I thought that facebok has more though because it is a social network.
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