Friends With Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook

eBook Conversion Rates, YouTube and the Cobbler’s Children

I know, I know, it’s been a wasteland around this site for months. It’s the cobblers’ children problem. When we do web-based PR all day, we don’t really feel like coming home and writing about it.

And besides, we’ve had other, more papery fish to fry. A few months after we released our ebook, we got a contract from No Starch Books to write a dead tree version of our ebook for publication. So–along with our busy day jobs–that’s what we’ve been doing.

In fact, we’re probably soon going to move this blog over to a new domain which reflects the new title for our book. I can’t quite divulge the title just yet (the dust hasn’t settled), but stay tuned.

In the meantime, I thought I’d share some information that I thought might be of interest. Since we launched, we’ve been tracking conversion data in Google Analytics, to get a sense of where our book sales are coming from.  Here are some conversion rates for the sites that sent us the majority of our traffic over the past 14 months. Where relevant, links go to the particular pages that are sending the most traffic within that domain.

Capulet (our professional site) - 7.9%
YouTube - 6.4%
Facebook - 6.2%
TopRankBlog - 5%
Direct (reflecting offline marketing, mostly) - 4%
Common Craft - 2.9%
Web-Strategist - 2.5%
Flickr - 1.27%
DarrenBarefoot.com (for a while I ran an ad on all 4500 of my archived pages) - 1%
Seth Godin - 0.8%
Google (organic search) - 0.7%
Twitter - 0.7%
StumbleUpon - 0.0%

A couple of notes about these numbers:

• Most of these numbers reflect what I see in our client sites. One exception is YouTube, which, based on my experience with other video projects, seems surprisingly high. Julie suggested that it might be because visitors have clicked through to YouTube from another site, and the video ‘closed the deal’ as it were.
• We more or less stopped promoting the ebook in March or April of 2008, and started spending that time researching and writing the new book. That’s possibly why, for example, Twitter is converted so poorly. Or, equally possibly, visitors who follow links from Twitter are transient by nature.
• Obviously the nature of the content on the source site matters a lot. A single link is unlikely to convert as effectively as a profile or positive review.

What do you think of those results? Are there any surprises in these numbers for you?

Tags: conversions, dead tree edition, google analytics, no starch books, youtube