However, there’s one other thing to consider… How much effort it requires to drive both kinds of traffic. If we could calculate how many “minutes per visitor” worth of effort both required, we might find that social media traffic provides a better overall ROI–if it’s a lot easier for you to secure traffic from those sources.

Great to see someone crunching a few #s!

On the other hand, I have a webzine that covers a wide variety of social issues. Search traffic isn’t great for this site…people who are looking for information or commentary on a particular event typically search for that event, land to the relevant article, and then move on from there. On the other hand, social media visitors are more likely to be interested in the general type of commentary on the site (as opposed to a particular news story). I haven’t crunched numbers, but anecdotally many of our social media visitors view multiple pages and become return visitors–almost none of our search traffic does.

I’m also not surprised by the findings as traffic driven by search engines, is likely to produce visitors more inclined to be in a “search and purchase” mode.

My own opinion is that traffic driven solely by social media is more important for business/brand awareness and raising profile, as I am currently finding out by my own research in this area.

Although I was intrigued to see that results for returning visitors as I would have estimated it to have been higher for the web site driven by search engines.

Also, statistics aside, there is branding value in having both top search positions and a high profile on social media sites.