The DIGG effect
Monday, December 19th, 2005
Posted by Ryan Holmes
Recently I made a posting that Diggers Dugg enough to hit front page on Digg.com (posting here). I have always been curious about the effects of hitting front page of Digg so I put together a bit of a post mortem analysis of getting Dugg to share with the curious.
The first and most obvious effect of getting Dugg is a massive hit to the server coined “the digg effect” aka “slashdot effect”. This can resemble a server attack called a denial of service attack and basically slows the server to a halt. You can see our traffic below. It DEFINITELY peaked while the article was front page, and even kept traffic at a higher level the following day.
The second interesting note is that although approximately 87% of people bounced after they read the article, many stuck around. In terms of numbers, 13% of visitors or 520 users (4000 * 13% = 520) did stick around. So what does this mean? Maybe they found something else useful or interesting on our site.
Comparison of ROI for Blogging VS Pay Per Click Advertising
From a marketing perspective I think this really shows the value of blogging and submission to sites like Digg. How would this stack up in terms of ROI if we were to compare to our Google Adwords Pay Per Click campaign? Below are some napkin sketches comparisons.
Assumptions
- Cost per Click through our bided Google Adwords campaign is $.50 so we’ll use that as a cost per user
- We want to compare apples and apples here, so let’s try to find out how many people that saw the Digg article stick around vs how many people who enter through our Adwords campaign stick around.
- This isn’t completely precise. Adword users are more targeted but on the other hand we’ll get more than 4000 users plus have many SEO friendly inbound links from the digg article, so let’s just say these factors cancel each other out.
Digg Article
4000 users with 520 non bouncing users
Google Adwords
With a 44% bounce rate on our Adwords campaign to get 520 users we would need 1181 initial users. (Our Adwords Campaign for Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization and Web development keywords has a bounce rate of 44%). At .50 * 1181, we’re looking at spending $590.
Conclusion
From a purely ROI perspective blogging makes sense, especially if you hit the jackpot by getting a front page Digg article. Working on getting relevant articles written and promoted to your website is great for users and search engine optimization, and this is exactly what Invoke’s team of writers helps our
