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.
