Email is number one for referrals

I was reviewing the stats relating to my last post about the performance of Social Media Releases earlier today. Apart from being very pleasantly surprised to have nearly reached 1000 unique views (making this easily my most visited post to date!) I also found that the number one source of traffic was “direct”.

This means traffic that has been referred to the urls directly and not from another online source. Now unless anyone is able to remember a url with 141 characters, which I am guessing is unlikely, then I assume all of these visits must have come from people visiting the post from emails that include a hyperlink.

The breakdown of unique visits and their sources is as follows:

Source

Direct/mail 481 49%
Twitter 284 29%
Blogs 83 8%
Search 68 7%
Facebook 42 4%
Other 23 2%
981 100%

Twitter also counts for almost a third of the visits, which isn’t surprising given that the post has been tweeted 128 times to date (thank you to everyone who RT’d).

But the fact that almost half of all visits were direct demonstrates the power that email still has as a tool for sharing information with your community. Glad we didn’t forget to mention it in our video (2:25) on how news spreads online :-)