Not all traffic is created equal. Certain types of traffic is much more likely to convert to a sale than others. It’s all about catching the right surfer in the right mindset to make a purchase. In the adult space, the colloquialism for the best kind of traffic is a guy with “his dick in one hand and his credit card in the other.”
Some types of traffic are notorious for having low CTR and conversion rates including traffic from torrent sites, pop-up ads and from poor and third world countries.
But now the new king of poor conversion and click through rates has emerged; and that crown goes to facebook traffic. Ad click through rates of 3-7 per 10,000 pageviews are not uncommon; a truly abhorrent figure. Wouldn’t you think that someone would just ACCIDENTLY click an advert more frequently than that? It turns out not.
The problem is that when people are on Facebook, they are not in the mindset to purchase anything. One session from an average Facebook Whore might produce 200 page views to various groups, widgets, photos and messages; but that suffer is just not interested in buying anything; their mind is elsewhere.
Then, if that surfer finally does get the inclination to buy something, they just type Google in the address bar and start their search anew with something like “buy cheap [keyword]“ or even directly to Amazon.com.
That’s why much of this facebook hype may be overblown. Traffic is surging and millions more users join every month (much like Myspace was just 18 months ago). But two questions need to be answered before we take that $15 billion valuation too seriously:
1. Is facebook a fad like every other social networking site has been? Will everyone abandon it when the next best thing comes along? And more importantly:
2. How do you get a facebook user in the mindset to purchase? If you can’t, how do you monitize that traffic long term?
This isn’t a cut on Facebook or on Mark Zuckerberg; that guy’s a Genius. But when you’re sporting the least valuable traffic on the Net and you have a valuation of several thousand times earnings: it may just be time to get out while the gettin’s good.
7 Responses to “Facebook: The Worst Traffic on the Net.”
I couldn’t agree with you more. I have set up a few websites that rank quite well and get decent traffic, but I can’t get them to convert. (PS Im running mostly Adsense) I then found one niche where people were looking for something and would be willing to pay for it. My CTR is almost up to 12% even though the traffic is quite low. I know with better ad placement and some more SEO to get to the top position that the payoff will be much better than all the wasted time and energy for high traffic low conversion websites.
Yep, it’s true there’s no ROI is SMO. or very little.
I have had some great success with free trial offers with facebook but not using their official advertising platform.
[…] Quadzilla may be a bit upset because of his poor CTR, but that doesn’t necessarily mean every advertiser will be experiencing the same, otherwise Facebook Ads would be out of business now. His post however, focuses on the let downs of Facebook because of its poor results (as stated by Quadzilla) in regards to sales conversions. […]
[…] Today I got a message from one of my friends on MyBlogLog Corey, who asked me about my opinion in an article posted by QuadsZilla, the article entitled "Facebook: The Worst Traffic on the Net." […]
[…] CollegeHumor and Connected Ventures cofounder Ricky Van Veen is starting the smack talk early for Thursday’s match and he wasn’t afraid to take a low blow and hit Facebook where it really hurts - Its inability to affectively leverage advertisers and create click-throughs. “Dear Facebook, Looking forward to Thursday. Your winning percentage will be even lower than your click-through rates. Love, CollegeHumor.” […]
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I have long suspected the same thing about facebook traffic. I am just curious where you pulled your data from in terms of conversion and CTR?