The Digg Effect: Conclusion…Does It Help?
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When I posted a funny video about Bill Gates and Napoleon Dynamite, my intent was to see what impact that Digg could have on exposing my blog to others. As well, my intent was to show the after effects of the “Digg Effect”. Noah on Okdork is keeping me honest on this one.
“The Digg Effect” is the catapult in hits that your site obtains when you submit a story through Digg that other “Diggers” find interesting. The ultimate question is whether it would do anyone like me any good? (If you’d like to read Part I of this test, click here).
Statistics (The Digg Effect is the big bounce):
I might be reporting this a day early… you’ll notice the last point on the chart is quite low. That’s because the stats haven’t fully been reported for yesterday.
My Conclusion:
A week after my big hits, I’m still getting some trickles of traffic from Digg. However, the number of multiple visits vs. first-time visits is up from 6.38% to 11.77%. That means that some of my “diggers” have “dugg” my site. As well, the number of folks that are subscribed to my feed has tripled and are reading daily (stats by Feedburner). Overall, the number of visitors to my site on a daily basis is up 300%. It’s difficult to see on the graphs since the scale shoots up to cover the Digg event… but the trend after the event is up quite a bit.
Is this a good thing? Perhaps! Out of the 4,000 odd folks that came to my site during the Digg event, I probably added another 100 or so readers to my site on a daily basis. Don’t get me wrong, this is a terrible retention rate. In part, because such a small portion of the viewers of the video might actually be interested in my blog. It’s much like advertising your Yoga Studio in the newspaper. Sure, a million folks might glance at the ad… but virtually all of them won’t care.
Would I do it again?
Possibly. I think I would rather avoid the videos that are really not relevant to my readers/subscribers. If I have a video of something pertaining to Marketing, Automation, or Indianapolis… I’d probably take the chance of burying my site again. Outside of that, though, I’m not really worried about exposing my blog to folks who don’t give a hoot.
great follow up. i completely agree about the relevance. glad some like myself stuck around and enjoy reading your postings.
noah
okdork.com
Personally, I don’t think the quality is there. It’s one of the faults that I have with Digg, their categories are so ambiguous that the subject matter isn’t really targeted to the audience. Some of the other social bookmarking sites do a better job at targeting a niche that might stick around, but not Digg.
The conversion rate above was less than 0.25%. The digg continued to bring in readers after the initial digg, so that’s why I estimate ‘less than’.
Doug