Citysearch: Each Item Shared Through Facebook Connect Generates 30 Clicks
Citysearch, one of the first websites to launch Facebook Connect integration in beta last November, has rolled out its Facebook Connect integration to all users as part of a larger redesign effort to make Citysearch more social.
With Facebook Connect, users can login with their Facebook accounts on Citysearch and share their local reviews with Facebook friends through Facebook’s feed system. In addition, users see the reviews written by their Facebook friends at the top of the Citysearch listings.
How has the beta test gone? CEO Jay Herratti told Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times,
In the four months the site has been testing Facebook Connect, 94 percent of reviewers have published their reviews to Facebook, where an average of 40 people see them and 70 percent click back to Citysearch. That has translated into new members: daily registrations on Citysearch have tripled.
In other words, each item shared through Facebook Connect generates 40 impressions and 28 unique visitors – a lot of traffic per shared item. While it’s still too early to specifically characterize the value of that traffic in dollars, it’s very interesting to see how Facebook is generating traffic to content sites. Facebook drove more traffic to Perez Hilton than Google in January, and is sending traffic to video sites with Facebook Connect as well.
March 23rd, 2009 at 1:39 pm
Wow great stats!
March 23rd, 2009 at 4:19 pm
Hi Justin,
Thanks for pointing out this article! I don’t understand how CitySearch is able to measure the number of impressions that the feed story items are generating. How do they know it’s 40? Do you know of any good way to measure this? Perhaps by counting the number of images served, but this still wouldn’t factor image cacheing on the Facebook side.
CitySearch can clearly measure the number of visitors per feed story, but they don’t reference that number directly in the article. We might be jumping to the wrong conclusion.
At the last Facebook Garage, Josh Elman mentioned that the average Connect feed story generates 3-5 clicks, with some cases as high as 20. 28 seems a bit high given these guidelines.
Thoughts?
March 23rd, 2009 at 4:24 pm
Nisan, that’s a good question! I don’t know how they know that it’s 40 – I’m assuming Facebook told them. I agree, 28 seems pretty high.
March 23rd, 2009 at 8:01 pm
[...] today, we described the metrics Citysearch has seen with their Facebook Connect integration: for each restaurant review shared on Facebook, about 30 people on average click through to [...]
March 23rd, 2009 at 10:15 pm
Definitely worth watch closely, great post Justin!
wllr
P.s., I still need help setting up FB Connect on my blog… ;-)
March 23rd, 2009 at 10:16 pm
Oh yeah…any stats on how much traffic FBConnect has driven to your site since you’ve installed it?
wllr
March 31st, 2009 at 10:30 am
[...] even Citysearch itself already features support for Facebook Connect as well, which, according to Inside Facebook, is generating a constant stream of new traffic for [...]
March 31st, 2009 at 11:19 am
[...] even Citysearch itself already features support for Facebook Connect as well, which, according to Inside Facebook, is generating a constant stream of new traffic for [...]
April 5th, 2009 at 11:05 am
Ohhh, I wish I could have this on my site! I use webs.com. How hard would it be to install??
April 6th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
[...] optimizing the way your site supports Facebook Share, webmasters can get as much as the 20-30 clicks per feed story that some Facebook Connect partners are seeing with much simpler integration work (it can be as [...]
June 11th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
[...] as well – in the case of other Facebook Connect implementations, each shared item can actually generate up to 30 clicks back to the Connect-enabled [...]