Does repeat traffic = word of mouth?

[Makaveli2007]

If you run a niche site or blog and because of your useful content you can get a decent percentage of your traffic to come back and turn them into (long-term) repeat visitors.

Dont you get a lot of word-of-mouth / referrals through them?

I know I read one blog on SEO/marketing regularly (daily) and because I've mentioned it to many other people (on the internet people of common interests obviously gather and communicate a lot), I've been wondering how much word-of-mouth referrals the site owner has gotten through me already...

...and if I could make that work for my site.

However, when I hear about web analytics data of other people it seems like word-of-mouth referrals from repeat traffic are a tiny percentage at best.

[mack]

Its almost impossible to put any real figures to this because it would be so diffiicult to track word of mouth referals. In a marketing campaigns many companies/websites will use a sepeerate url to track the effectivless of their ad, but with word out mouth referalls the person will just tell them "check out example.com" there is no real way to determine the diffference between a type in referal, a repeat user and a word of mouth referal.

Some sites annoy me by asking me to fill ut a questionaire when I am on their site. You have probably seen them, a bit of Ajax or JS will float up in fromt of you and ask you to take their survey. This is probably the best oppertunity the site will have to engage the user and ask then how they found the site...

Search engine
magazine
tv
word of mouth

I can't think of any meaningful way to track this sort of data using analytics.

Mack.

[Makaveli2007]

Hi and thanks for the reply,

I'm not sure I'd want to risk doing such a survey...we all know how quickly people click the back button on the web hehe. Would that not cause them to probably use some acquired visitors? I guess one would have to determine (or guess) if that loss is compensated for by the data about acquisition channels...

Wouldn't one be able to get a rough idea of this by looking at type-in traffic and filtering out the repeat visitors?..and then comparing it against "similar" sites, get a bench-mark from somewhere (even if it's just memory)?

I understand it can't be tracked exactly, but is it not possible to get a rough idea of this?

[mack]

To be honest it will vary a lot from site to site. For example I would imagine close to 90% of all Google users are word of mouth referals. Amazon will probably have a very high percentage also, makbee 60% but as we look at sits a lot lower on the radar the figures will be a lot lower.

These figures are just my own estimates...

In order to get word of mouth traffic you need to have the wow factor. Give users somethign that they either can't find else where, or do it a lot better than anyone else. Simply having a site wont get work of mouth referals, it needs to be special.

Think about the last time you recomended a site to someone, why did you do it? What was it about the site that made you want to recomend it?

Mack.

[Makaveli2007]

Usually the sites I recommend are those that I keep on coming back to :-). That's why I asked this repeat traffic thing.

The 2 blogs and 4 forums I read/post to when it c omes to this web-stuff...I've mentioned/recommended all of them before.

WebmasterWorld is an exception, though (I just noticed), I've mentioned I was there, etc. but usually just say WebmasterWorld, as everybody I talk to in this field has of courser heard of it before ;).

Anyway, a site needs to be very useful so I keep on coming back, and if it is and I do end up coming back regularly (over the long haul), then I'll end up recommending/mentioning it many, many times to people in the niche (though of course this depends on how well me and the people in this niche are connected - in internet marketing everyone's connected very well ovbiously ;)).

Anyway tahnks for the input!