I was doing a PowerPoint presentation yesterday on why advertising on blogs is better than in any other online media when I thought it would be really great if I have the figures to show and back up my claims/theories. Then I realized, I was given some Google Analytics data by a recent advertiser. And here’s what I got…

Without divulging too much information, I compared the performance of the ads on my blog to four (4) other sites which I know carried the same advertising. Coincidentally, the other sites were news sites, a forum and a portal so we have a nice mix of online media to compare.

Of the top 5 referring sites, my blog was the 3rd highest referrer with 19.33% of the total traffic contributed by all five. The first two were the news sites that sent in 39.05% and 23.88%, the forum site sent only 11.56% and the portal 6.19%.

To think that one of the news sites had (at least) 192 times more number of monthly pageviews than this blog, placing 3rd in terms of referrals ain’t bad at all. Too bad, I couldn’t get any click-thru-rates.

What surprised me more were the results of the other metrics:

New Visitors

Site A - 80.5% new visitors
Site B - 69.5% new visitors
Site C - 64.5% new visitors
Site D - 78.0% new visitors
YugaTech - 45% new visitors

Depending on how you look at it, either this blog doesn’t refer more unique visitors or visitors keep clicking on the ads more than once (which is good right?).

Page Views per Visit

Site A - 2.17 pageviews
Site B - 2.06 pageviews
Site C - 1.78 pageviews
Site D - 2.64 pageviews
YugaTech - 6.12 pageviews

Average Time on Site

Site A - 2.24 minutes
Site B - 2:38 minutes
Site C - 1:35 minutes
Site D - 3:07 minutes
YugaTech - 10:17 minutes

It only means one thing — the blog drives more quality traffic because they actually use the referred site more. The figures above shows us 3 to 5 times more site usage by visitors coming from the blog.

Bounce Rates

Site A - 60%
Site B - 60%
Site C - 75%
Site D - 56%
YugaTech - 34%

Bounce rates indicate the percentage of people leaving the referred site right away. So the lower the bounce rates, the better since it means visitors are sticking to the site. Here’s two words to describe that — targeted traffic.

I do not know how much advertising money was spent on all the 5 sites (including this blog) but from the limited data I gathered, this blog only got around 2% of the total ad spendings (I’m pretty sure it’s lower).

If we just go by the raw number of visitors, spending 2% of your ad budget to get 19% of the traffic (and high quality traffic at that) is a great ROI.

The hard numbers above will show you that blog advertising has a much higher Return of Investment (ROI). So next time you’re thinking of doing online advertising, do consider blogs in your budget. =)

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