Social Traffic

How much do you have?

[eek2121]

I've thought of a killer idea i want to try out that will pull in huge amounts of social traffic, but very little in the way of organic traffic. Does anyone else run a similar type of scenario? Do you derive the majority of your traffic from social media to your adsense pages? How long have you been doing it?

I've heard bad things about large volumes of social traffic getting the banhammer from Google and I definitely don't want that. My websites have all been predominantly organic Google and Bing with a minority (5-15%) of social traffic and probably 10-15% direct traffic.

[ember]

Maybe 1% social, which is why I think I have a very healthy RPM.

[poppill]

Where can I read about social sites getting the banhammer? Whats a better ratio?

[eek2121]

I've read posts scattered throughout the internet claiming that sites with tons of social traffic (with unpredictable patterns) tend to get banned. Especially those that don't follow consistent patterns.

[atladsenser]

I don't think you can harm yourself in any way from social traffic. I occasionally get big traffic boosts from social media, but the boost usually is fairly fleeting; after a few days, things go back to normal. IMO, social is a great way to introduce your site and your content to people who otherwise wouldn't find you. But it's just one part of a portfolio of ways to attract visitors to your site.

I also don't see how social can be bad for your site when Google has its own (albeit little used, in the U.S. at least) social network.

[IanCP]

Answering the question?

Relatively: NIL <0.01%

Kids, exchanging homework solutions I imagine.

[DCXpolitical]

predominant social media traffic is detrimental to my monetization efforts. When an article goes hot in social and stays that way for weeks my RPM drops typically by 60-70% - not to mention what it does to my CPC and CTR.

I'm considering using scripts to block ads from social media traffic so the above mentioned stats aren't affected because it has long term neg effects on my campaigns overall.

Social traffic DOES NOT CLICK or interact ... they come, they consume your hard work and then they bounce. The phenomenon doesn't affect just monetization either ... they rarely sign up for email alerts or interact with the page in any way.

For me, social is a good way to kick start a new post and according to google ranking factors social popularity def has a bearing on overall seo - but I have some posts with nearly half a million shares and nearly as many pageviews from social - which have either 0 or 1, maybe 2 PR afforded by google.

Use it to jump start, but I'd advise against displaying ads to social traffic.