The community attracts people from the industry i.e. those dealing with search engine marketing and more broadly marketing in internet the following comparison should be considered valid. I started by doing some preparation in our Google Analytics account by creating an advanced segment that I called social traffic which consists of visits tagged with referrals containing words such as twitter facebook stumble upon linkedin flickr and combinator thanks to which it catches the vast majority of traffic generated by social networking sites. I then compared this segment in terms of traffic intensity for the last weeks with the traffic coming from search engines.
Traffic from the community visits from sources Traffic from organic results visits from sources. Next I compared the percentage of Internet users coming from both sources who reached the landing pages selling the PRO subscription. For traffic from organic results it looks like thisa chart Brazil Telegram Number Data showing landing page views from search engine traffic However for traffic from social media the graph looks like thisa chart showing landing page views from social media traffic What do you see in these charts . of Internet users coming from organic results were considering a subscription . of Internet users coming from the community were considering a subscription.
I cant reveal absolute numbers but I will tell you that quite a solid number of people coming from the search engine bought a subscription while Internet users coming from the community didnt buy anything . More When I looked at my community traffic for the last year it turned out that this traffic did not generate a single subscription sale. Social networking sites are great for drawing traffic building your chances of future sales but they dont stand a chance against search engines when it comes to direct conversions. For the sake of completeness I would like to point out that noI researched the sources of prepurchase visits which makes my conclusions.