June 3rd, 2009

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Social Media
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What is the Average Clickthrough Rate on Twitter?

On Monday, I asked Twitter users to complete a very short survey. They answered questions about how many followers they had, and how many clicks a link received when they shared it using a service like Bit.ly.

I asked because I wanted to get a sense of the clickthrough rate for links shared on Twitter. I received about 45 responses. Not enough to qualify as statistically significant, but a good start nonetheless.

To get the average clickthrough rate, I just divide the total number of clicks reported (1656) by the total number of followers reported (46973). That gives us a rate of 3.5%. This means that, on average, a link shared on Twitter will be clicked by 3.5% of your followers.

As you might expect, there’s a relationship between the total number of followers and the clickthrough rate. For those with less than 800 followers, the clickthrough rate is 8.6%. For those with more than 800 followers, the rate falls to just 2.5%. This make sense. If you have a small group of followers, you probably have a closer relationship, on average, with each of them. They’re likelier to click links that you share.

Thanks to those who participated in the survey. If you’d still like to contribute, take 18 seconds and do so.

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Comments: 9 Responses so far

Christian Nally
June 3rd, 2009
7:54 am

Interesting Numbers Darren!

Are you making any allowance for the bots trolling twitter? http://tr.im reports a fair number of those.

[Reply]

darren Reply:
June 3rd, 2009 at 8:01 am

Nope, it’s a pretty unsophisticated survey. How do you think I’d make allowances for bots?

Are the bots trolling in real time, or after the fact (like search engine spiders)? I ask because, as it happens, 3.5% is almost exactly the rate that personal Twitter sees. I’d assume that those were all humans clicking immediately after I post a link, but maybe not.

[Reply]

Duane Storey
June 3rd, 2009
8:00 am

It would be interesting to find out if there’s a correlation between the number of followers your followers have, and the click through rate (i.e., if all your followers follow a lot of people, chances are they might have not even seen your tweet).

Let me know if you do any more Twitter stats — I might be able to hack out some Twitter API code to grab some stats.

[Reply]

Eric von Coelln
June 3rd, 2009
12:16 pm

Just did something a little similar, looking at the tweets from different brands, the “active” followers, and an implied click-through rate - found the same 1-3.5% range: http://www.voncoelln.com/eric/2009/06/03/after-the-tweet-exploring-twitter-click-through-rate-benchmarking-to-measure-engagement/

[Reply]

darren Reply:
June 3rd, 2009 at 1:59 pm

Thanks for that. Always nice to be validated. I suspect that when we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of followers, the clickthrough rate would fall to 1% or lower.

[Reply]

Les médias sociaux vont-ils remplacer Google? • Michelle Blanc, M.Sc. commerce électronique. Marketing Internet, consultante, conférencière et auteure
June 9th, 2009
4:20 pm

[...] médias sociaux. Puis Darren Barefoot fait une petite expérience qu’il explique dans son billet What is the average clickthrough rate on twitter? Son analyse finale révèle que : To get the average clickthrough rate, I just divide the total [...]

Paul Seaman
June 20th, 2009
4:40 am

Great post. Useful research. I hope you go on to do more such work with a larger sample base.

[Reply]

Update on Twitter CTR Rates
July 9th, 2009
10:01 am

[...] month, I wrote about what sort of clickthrough rate you could expect from links shared on Twitter. I rewrote and expanded that post over on Mashable. [...]

Twitter’s Click Through Rate | Headliner
December 1st, 2009
7:21 pm

[...] Ever put a link up on Twitter? Ever wonder how many people clicked on that link? Well Darren Barefoot’s curiousity about the subject motivated him to create a survey regarding the likelihood of a Twitter imbedded link being clicked on. The survey used only 45 participants, and is in no way a definitive source on the subject. Nonetheless, it offers a small window into the life of a link of twitter. Check out Barefoot’s survey, which estimates the click through rate at about 3%, here. [...]

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