According to a report from global information services company Experian Hitwise, Facebook visitors are more loyal to News and Media websites than are visitors from News.Google.com. “In particular, among the top 5 Print Media websites in the week ending March 6, 2010, 78% of Facebook.com users were returning visitors compared to 67% from Google News. The figures are almost identical for Broadcast Media, with a 77% returning rate for Facebook.com compared to 64% for Google News.”

The KPIs used in this report were:

• % New versus returning visitors,  where new visitors are defined as those that haven’t visited the site within the past 30 days
• % Returning visitor rate

Heather Hopkins, Senior Online Analyst at Hitwise, uses the following example: ” 81% of visits to CNN.com in the week to March 6, 2010 were returning visitors while 84% of visitors to CNN.com that came from Facebook.com were returning visitors and 72% from Google News were returning visitors.”

According to Hitwise, in most cases, Google.com is the first source of traffic to these sites. However, visitors from Google are less likely to be returning visitors than average for either Google News or Facebook.

The KPIs used for measuring performance of a website can make the difference when concluding if the website is successful or not. Therefore, selecting the most relevant performance indicators is a very important process.

smartKPIs.com offers specific performance indicators examples for this area in the Library of KPI examples for Online Presence.

References:

Experian Hotwise (2010), Facebook Visitors Come Back Again and Again, available at http://weblogs.hitwise.com/us-heather-hopkins/2010/03/facebook_visitors_come_back_ag.html (accessed 22nd March 2010)

smartKPIs.com (2010), “KPI examples for the Online presence”, available at http://www.smartkpis.com/kpi/functional-areas/online-presence-ecommerce/ (accessed 15 March 2010).