How Facebook Like for Tags can Increase Total Page Views by 25% to 40%

A CNN.com Case Study

Rikard Kjellberg
IngBoo, Inc.

Summary
CNN.com has 38 million unique users per month. 9% or 3.4 million users visit from Facebook. This report is a case
study illustrating how IngBoo can increase the total page views for CNN.com by 25% to 40% by enabling Facebook
Like for tags, a novel way to connect with the audience based on user intent. There is an inherent conflict between
the desire to maximize reach and the desire to increase revisits to a web site. This report shows how connections
based on user intent removes this conflict and aligns the two objectives.

Background
Facebook represents the single largest social community on the web with 540 million unique visitors per month,
generating 570 billion page views[1]. Web publishers are expanding their reach into the community via fan pages
and integration of social plug-ins. This case study looks at CNN.com, its current presence in Facebook and how this
can be further improved. In April of 2010 CNN.com launched a set of new social features on their web properties.
According to Compete.com[2] the move had no measurable effect on unique users. In fact, there appears to be a
slight decline.

Figure 1 – Unique Users in the US for CNN.com

CNN fan pages in Facebook have around 2.2 million fans[3]. The updates from CNN and the resulting sharing within
Facebook result in 3.4 million users visiting from Facebook every month, generating 22.4 million visits and 74
million page views[2][4][5]. These visits are a result of the updates pushed to the fan pages, the social plug-ins on
the CNN property and the sharing inside the Facebook community. Facebook is the second largest source of
referrals to CNN, referring 9% of its monthly unique users.

Looking at Reach and Facebook Sharing

In analyzing the CNN fan pages, for every update roughly 1,675 users (a.k.a. “fans”) share with their circle of
friends. Sharing happens via the Like button or the standard comment-and-share function provided by Facebook.
Consequently, the probability of an update being shared is 0.08% (1,675 share events / 2.2 million fans). The
sharing represents increased reach for CNN.com. To estimate the effective reach, we need to see how the sharing
propagates through the social network. The average Facebook user has 130 friends[6].

©2010 IngBoo Inc. http://www.ingboo.com partners@ingboo.com

There is always overlap between friends so we assume that the non-overlapping circle of friends is about 100. We
further assume that the probability of sharing (0.08%) remains constant through the degrees of separation., The
resulting effective reach calculates to 2.3 million users or 8% more than the direct reach (2.2 million fans). Figure 2
illustrates how sharing propagates updates through the Facebook community.

share

Fan update
Page

1st degree 2nd degree 3rd degree

Figure 2 – Facebook Sharing

Degree of Separation Reach

First degree 2,152,220
Second degree 167,337
Third degree 13,011
Fourth degree 1,012
Fifth degree 79
Sixth degree 6
Total 2,333,664
Table 1 – Effective Reach

As shown in table 1, after six degrees of separation, the reach has diminished. Based on the effective reach (table
1), the click-through-rate (CTR) can be established. Each update generates roughly 5,400 revisits to CNN, which
represents a CTR of 0.23%. This CTR is in line with other research.
For example, Mashable[7] found that the CTR is inversely proportional to the fan base. A larger audience results in
lower CTR, typically well below 1%. There is thus a conflict between the desire to increase reach and the desire to
maximize revisits to the web site.

©2010 IngBoo Inc. http://www.ingboo.com partners@ingboo.com

A Solution to the Reach-Revisit Conflict
According to Daily Blog Tips[8], the key to improved CTR is targeting. If the updates are relevant to the audience,
one can expect significantly higher revisits. The CTR is typically several multiples better than updates without
targeting. The solution is to provide the right targeting for the audience. However, a larger audience represents a
broader set of interests. This can be managed by allowing users to connect with the web site while also expressing
their interest. In fact, they do so when they decide to “Like” and share an article or when they do on-site searches.
Every article is typically tagged with keywords that help define its category, topic and other context. The IngBoo
solution provides means to attach a Like button to tags or search keywords. This will automatically sub-segment
the audience based on consumer interest (a.k.a. “intent”). Furthermore, the user is now connected to the web site
for ongoing updates and recurring opportunities for sharing. Anytime the web site publishes a new article with the
same set of tags or keywords, the user is notified via the Facebook news feed of the new article. The resulting CTR
for CNN would increase from 0.23% to well over 1% (4x) even in the most conservative estimates.

Looking at the Effects of Facebook Like for Tags

The effects of a share function tied to tags are profound even in the most conservative analysis. If it is assumed
that all other factors remain constant and only the CTR improves from 0.23% to 0.72%, the uplift in page views is
25%. If the CTR improves to 1%, the uplift is 40%.

Conclusions
CNN.com can increase their monthly page views dramatically by adopting a new model for sharing via Facebook
Like. Instead of one-time sharing, a context-aware connection is established, defined by the reader. New updates
are filtered based on the keywords attached to the connection and only relevant updates are pushed to the user’s
news feed. This case study assumes that the reduced number of updates reaching each user is cancelled out by the
increase in connected users as well as the increase in updates being pushed into Facebook. Further analysis should
look at how many articles are being produced for each content category and how this impacts the resulting
updates for the connected users.

Contact
To learn more about IngBoo’s syndication solutions for social media and Facebook, email us at
partners@ingboo.com .

References
[1] The Top 1,000 Most Visited Sites on the Web - DoubleClick Ad Planner
(http://www.google.com/adplanner/static/top1000/#)
[2] Compete US Statistics for CNN.com (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/cnn.com/)
[3] Facebook CNN Fan Pages (http://www.facebook.com)
[4] Alexa Clickstream Analysis for CNN.com (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/cnn.com#)
[5] Alexa Audience Analysis for CNN.com (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/cnn.com#)
[6] Facebook Statistics (http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics)
[7] What Click-Through Rate Can You Expect from Twitter? (http://mashable.com/2009/07/07/twitter-
clickthrough-rate/)
[8] What is the Average CTR on Twitter? Let’s Find Out (http://www.dailyblogtips.com/what-is-the-average-ctr-on-
twitter-lets-find-out/)

©2010 IngBoo Inc. http://www.ingboo.com partners@ingboo.com