unique visitors
Evidence for Increasing Online Use that is also Accelerating
If you sum up the total unique user sessions in Jan 2008, Jan 2009, and Jan 2010, you get
Jan 2008 – 285M
Jan 2009 – 337M
Jan 2010 – 413M
That is a year-over-year increase of 18% and 23% respectively. Assuming the population of the world does not change that much year to year, the change in total unique sessions leads to the conclusion that online usage continues to increase noticeably.
The Compete.com chart below shows nearly identical number if unique users monthly — Google at 148M uniques and Yahoo at 132M uniques. And Facebook alone achieved another 134M uniques. So while the unique visitors across these 3 sites are not mutually exclusive, there are 414M unique user sessions in the month of January 2010

Well, this is strange. January 2010 numbers from Nielsen reveal Google has 66.3% of the search market, while Yahoo has 14.5% and Microsoft has 10.9% across its various properties. Google is 4x more than Yahoo and 6x more than Microsoft.

the problem with online metrics – it’s estimated, approximated, or extrapolated
TechCrunch based the following post on ComScore numbers, which shows “MySpace currently has 124 million monthly unique visitors, compared to Facebook’s 276 million” in Feb 2009.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/23/facebook-hockey-sticks-while-myspace-languishes/

But checking Compete and QuantCast the numbers are not just slightly different, they are way different.
Compete: Facebook 74M; MySpace 53M in Feb 2009
QuantCast: Facebook 79M; MySpace 66M in Feb 2009



Given the huge discrepancy, the only thing that can really be concluded is that Facebook has overtaken and is larger than MySpace now and continuing to widen the lead.
Sign of the times – “garage sale” sites all seeing increases in unique visitors
re: Craigslist More Popular Than MySpace : Sign of Economy Says Hitwise
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/craigslist-search-hitwise/9391/

the comparison to MySpace is irrelevant for the conclusion; furthermore, the report uses search volume for the comparison and people search for “craigslist” and “myspace” for entirely different reasons. And MySpace continues to have 8X the unique visitors as Craigslist — so it is not that Craigslist is more “popular” than MySpace.
A sign of the times is that “garage sale” type sites are all seeing increases in traffic — e.g. Craigslist, OLX, Backpage, etc.



social media benchmarks
Many clients have asked about social media benchmarks or social marketing benchmarks. They ask things like how many fans should they have on Facebook? They are concerned if they cannot project 1 million fans on their fan page.
But that is because most clients are coming from a reach and frequency background. Some have moved to unique visitors, pageviews, and time on site. But what is more important today is not that people get to the site or the time they spend, but what they do … so social intensity is a benchmark which captures the quantity and frequency of social actions like sharing, discussing, commenting, voting, etc. All of these actions lead to value that accumulates for other future visitors to the site.
Adwords – lower cost per click
Clicks Impressions CTR Avg Cost per Click Total spent
511 61,894 0.82% $0.47 per click $242.16
PayPerPost – optimal is lowest payment per post
dollars pageviews/clicks
$122.50 2630/120 $1.02 per click 4.6% CTR ($5 per post)
$183.25 1324/114 $1.61 per click 8.6% CTR ($10 per post)
$291.25 2369/260 $1.12 per click 11% CTR ($20 per post)
ReviewMe – www. johnchow. com
$300 – nearly no value; JohnChow pioneered link sharing to get his blog up to about rank 100 on Technorati before they changed the way they calculated authority; despite the many links to his blog, it was practically useless in driving any useful customers. Now his site has been penalized by Google and is only PageRank 3 site.
StumbleUpon – extremely useful in helping new users discover the site and features; the velocity of the clicks was incredible (approx 300 clicks in 5 minutes) BEST VALUE OVERALL flat rate $0.05 per click; you set the daily budget
Facebook benchmarks like Facebook CTRs, Facebook CPCs, and Facebook CPMs can be found here.
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