Vitrue Estimates Facebook Page Wall Click Through Rates at 6.5%
What kind of click through rates can brands expect to get on their Facebook Page walls? Social media agency Vitrue says the numbers can be pretty high.
Using new URL tracking and a few estimates, Vitrue is claiming that CTRs for content shared on a Page’s wall can be as high as 6.5%. While the numbers are encouraging, the method used to arrive at these numbers uses some facts and some guess work, as it’s impossible to arrive at a definite number when determining how many people are exposed to content in the News Feed.
“If a site has 100 fans and your wall post gets five clicks, that’s a 5% CTR,” CEO Reggie Bradford said in a recent article in AdAge. “But if you assume only about 20% of those folks actually saw the post, it’s really a 20% click-through rate.”
When numbers are broken down by demographic, Vitrue is claiming a 30% rate for users 18-24, 14% for ages 25-34 and 10% for 35-44. Females are more inclined to click though more than males, with 56% of women checking out links as opposed to 44% of men.
Of course, the biggest determinant of click through rate is content quality – and the numbers vary heavily. Wall posts must be relevant, engaging, and appropriate – if not, fans will not only not click, they might also hide your content from the stream altogether.
August 17th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
What exactly is being referred to here? Is it a link in a status update that has been published by a Page who acquired its fans after the Facebook Page redesign earlier this year or are they referring to links in an FBML box that you can put on the Facebook Page or is it the 1st comment on the Page wall by a fan?
The information shared is ambiguous.
August 17th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
Got it, Virtue refers to a status update as a ‘wall post’. Slaps head.
For a company that claims to ‘make brands social’ they do a bad job at using the right terminology.
And you CAN guesstimate the amount of people that see a status update from a Page.
Fans acquired after March 11th have status updates from Pages appear in the homepage stream.
Subtracting how many fans existed on March 15th and the total number of fans that have ‘unfan-ed’ the Page from the total number of fans to date gives an estimate of how many homepage streams a status update appears in.
How many people log in and see the status update before it disappears from the homepage is another question altogether. Virtue also neglects to include possible page views from individuals who are not fans but happen to stumble upon the Page either from a search engines or because the page appears in the ‘Suggestions’ or ‘Highlights’ section of the Homepage.
Also, CTR depends so heavily on the content being shared that you cannot take to the bank that 6.5% of people will click on a car insurance link vs. a link with ‘Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’ in the URL. In my experience even something as trivial as the type of URL shortener used (bit.ly vs. cl.igs for example) have a vastly different impacts on the CTR.
In all, the company provides very little info on a small data point and obfuscates the data with improper terminology.
August 17th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
Quick math correction…
“But if you assume only about 20% of those folks actually saw the post, it’s really a 20% click-through rate.”
Actually…
20% of 100 people would be 20 people and 5 people out of those 20 people would be a 25% click-through rate.
August 18th, 2009 at 7:52 am
Mark –
Thanks for the lengthy and thoughtful rebuttal. The beauty of the social web is conversations such as these. So, by all means, allow me to retort.
The terminology is in fact correct regarding wall post versus status update. The article is about click-through rates, which assumes there is a link included in the update to fans upon which they might “click.” You’ll note when a page admin updates their status and includes a properly formatted URL, the Facebook link function is automatically initiated. When the post is saved it becomes a “wall post” because it appears on the page wall and in the news feed of fans, but does NOT remain as the status. Therein lies the differentiation.
Please note, it is possible to include a link in your status update and cancel the FB link function, allowing the update to remain as the status. Although this must be done manually and it’s not a Facebook best practice. This is because the FB link function automatically includes a FB share function allowing readers to easily pass the message along to their friends.
You do make a good point about whether or not updates enter the news feed of fans for those users who became fans before 3/15, etc. Although based on that logic that would mean the update appeared in the news feed of less fans, which would decrease the denominator in the equation, which would actually make the CTR even higher.
At the end of the day there are lots of things that effect click through rate. Vitrue has developed an application suite which helps brands create more engaging posts to fans which incorporate images, audio and video in a way that can be easily measured.
Chad Estes
Director of Strategic Services @ Vitrue
September 4th, 2009 at 11:42 am
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