The power of Twitter & the "Ellen Effect"

So, on Thursday, one of my clients, the Vancouver Orphan Kitten Rescue Association (VOKRA) was linked to from the Ellen DeGeneres Show’s Blog, after being mentioned on the show. At the same time, a tweet was sent from the @TheEllenShow twitter account (As an aside, the reason for all of this is that Anna Torv, who is the star of the Vancouver-filmed show Fringe, fosters kittens for VOKRA, so she’s now much cooler in my books than she was before I knew this). Because of this one-time spike, I thought it would be interesting to have a look at VOKRA stats to see what sort of effect this had on their site, particularly as I had been worried a huge flood of traffic might down our servers (for the record, they passed with nary even a flinch. The charts below will show why).

As you can see, traffic generated from Ellen gave VOKRA a huge, but very brief, jump in traffic, from an average of 300 visitors a day to 3900 visitors. Which is nice to see. But, given Ellen's reach (she's the [4th-most influential woman in media](http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/14/most-influential-women-in-media-forbes-woman-power-women-oprah-winfrey_slide_5.html) & has over 3 million followers on twitter), I had been expecting a larger bump from it. What's particularly interesting, however, is how that traffic arrived at VOKRA:

Twitter blew the link on Ellen's blog out of the water, driving 3 times more traffic to it than the links on the blog. Of the twitter traffic, all but 100 of those clicks came either from the individual tweet or the main page of Ellen's account - the split is about 50/50 (of those 100 remaining visitors, all but 3 came from my own tweet - thanks, followers!). Being mentioned on the show was nearly as powerful as the tweet. Breaking down those Google searches, the most common was "[kitten rescue vancouver ellen](http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=kitten+rescue+vancouver+ellen)", which suggests to me that comes from people watching the show and searching. A mere 839 visitors clicked through from the blog post itself. Although, perhaps not that surprising: It takes far more investment in the topic to do that, as likely, you'll

1. Watch the show & become interested in the topic
2. THEN go to the Ellen show’s website and read more
3. AND FINALLY, click through to the end point.

Which is yes, only one extra step, but in terms of buy-in, seems much, much more to me. A final analysis. What VOKRA wants more than anything when you go to their site is one of 2 things:

1. Apply to adopt a kitten
2. Donate to them

What’s disappointing is that all this traffic had almost no effect on either of those 2 goals. There were a few more applications than usual over the past couple of days - a total of 14, vs, I believe, 8 for same period the previous week. And there was no effect on donations - no increase in either number of donations or amount over the previous week (given the increase in visitors, their donations-per-visitor ratio in fact just took a huge hit). My conclusions to the above? VOKRA’s homepage is not as effective as it should be in communicating those 2 goals, and should be looked at (hopefully this analysis will mean that I get the chance to do). Analyzing what visitors did at the site, nearly every visitor clicked on the big cat banner picture - and then nothing else. The 2nd most popular click was to the blog post about being on Ellen - and then nothing else. In fact, the links to adopt & donate did not see a similar-sized jump in clicks, whereas the blog, gallery  & about us pages all did.