Facebook Traffic Conversion

My recent post on the Nissan Leaf electric car went mini-viral quite quickly, and it led to some interesting data in terms of Facebook referral to Google AdSense click conversion.

My post fit into a relatively longtail niche about Steve Jobs actually ordering a Leaf on his iPhone 4 at the Apple WWDC. What ensued was a post by Nissan on their Nissan Leaf Facebook page which mentioned my post and linked back to my blog. With a growing number of fans of this car, my site seems to be reaping the benefit of this increased traffic, but something else happened to — my CTR (click-through-rate) for AdSense increased from a meager 0.35%-ish range to somewhere right around 1%.

I have had significant bumps in traffic from search before, but have never seen this. Some further testing is required, but after a solid week of this I’m starting to think that users coming from Facebook fan pages, or “like” pages as they seem to be called now, have a higher click engagement. Perhaps this type of internet browser is already in a click/information hungry state of mind if they are redirected from a product based page on Facebook.

Through this increase in web traffic I have also noticed that a good number of users seem to have adopted the web content based Facebook “Like/Recommend” button as there have also been a good number of “likes” on my post, which in turn has a snowball effect for increasing site visits.

It appears that generating traffic through Facebook in this way is highly actionable and brings a captive and highly engaged audience which ultimately leads to higher ad revenue and ad click conversion.