Driving traffic and e-commerce: How Facebook says it helps

Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan wrote today that Facebook has sent him some figures related to media websites using Like buttons and other social plugins.

Facebook claims that:

• The average media site integrated with Facebook has seen a 300% increase in referral traffic.
• People who sign in with Facebook at The Huffington Post view 22% more pages and spend 8 minutes longer than the average reader.
• When a Ticketmaster user posts a specific event they are attending, or may want to attend, to Facebook, it generates $5.30 of direct ticket sales.
• [Clothing retailer] American Eagle added the Like button next to every product on their site and found Facebook referred visitors spent an average of 57% more money than non-Facebook referred visitors.

For more figures, visit Sullivan’s article on SearchEngineLand.com.

But not everyone agrees that Facebook is the next big thing in e-commerce.
A report by Forrester Research, out last month, stated that “likes” don’t necessarily translate to revenues.

Average Facebook metrics for click-throughs was only 1 percent, and its conversion rate was 2 percent, the study noted. Comparatively, e-mail marketing has a click-through rate of 11 percent, and a conversion rate of 4 percent.

An analysis of online traffic by comScore last month found that Facebook and MySpace combined account for about 20 percent of all advertising traffic. However, they carry an average cost per thousand impressions of 56 cents – nearly $2 less than the Internet overall.