Digg’s Still Got It

Mike McDerment - March 5/2007

I’ve always been a little skeptical of Digg…but I think I’ve been converted.

A few weeks ago FreshBooks was mentioned as one of 25 apps in an article titled, “The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Web 2.0: Top 25 Apps to Grow your Business”. So why have I converted? Have a look at these results from our web analytics:

Digg Stats

The data is compelling. Our web analytics indicate the article sent FreshBooks 1009 visitors of which 113 trialed FreshBooks. Perhaps the best stat of them all is “Average Time per Visit” which indicates that of the 1009 people who came to FreshBooks.com from the article, on average they stayed on our site for 3 minutes and 36 seconds.

Now I’m not going to tell you how these numbers compare to other links we receive to FreshBooks, but I will tell you that that length of visitor over such a large sample size (1000+ visitors) indicates a very high quality of traffic referred. In fact, in my teleseminar podcasts with John Marshall - the CEO of ClickTracks - he indicated that average length of visit is the best single metric to establish visitor intent by referrer.

I would never have guessed that of Digg’s traffic would have been of such a consistently high quality. And yes…”technically” this article was not Digg traffic, it was only an article with a high number of Diggs. But the article looked sketchy to me…it has 880 Diggs and only 3 comments. Due to the low ratio of comments to Diggs I figured someone was trying to game the Digg system and just send any traffic they could get to the site. After reviewing my stats however, I find my scepticism was totally unfounded.

Imagine the traffic to links higher up in the article…FreshBooks was link 6 of 26.

Mar 6/07
12:28 am

Scott Meade says:

Mike - Congrats! on the well deserved mention. I too was a Digg skeptic, wondering why I need others that never met me to recommend what I will and will not find useful and, as you mention, there was that concern about it all being rigged anyway. Yet once I dugg in it really did provide value. It just works. Quality content filters up while junk gets discarded.

So, even if it works, what are the reasons blog authors don’t include Digg-This and other such social-bookmark chicklets more often? I’ve identified seven and wrote just yesterday at http://synapsoftware.com/blogit/ about how to overcome these self-imposed objections and try it out.

Mar 6/07
9:15 am

BradM says:

Sorry if I missed it, but referral software did you use above? Was it proprietary?

Mar 6/07
9:23 am

Mike McDerment says:

The report you see above is from the web analytics provider we use: IndexTools.com.