Companies worldwide have embraced social media as an additional customer engagement and sales channel. Rightly so, as Australians have visited Facebook more than 6 billion times in the last 12 months!

Even though companies have Facebook pages and Likes, what does that really mean to their traffic and customer acquisition?

This presents a great opportunity for us to use the latest Experian Hitwise feature – Clicks Reliance – now available to clients. Clicks Reliance enables you to identify how much competitors depend on core channels and sites for their traffic.

We’ve all been exposed to marketing efforts from the leading brands featured below. The number of visits to these brands’ websites varies, from more than 10 million per month to less than 100. So who do you think relies most on social media to drive traffic to their site?

The left column in the table below (Clicks) directly benchmarks the volume of social media traffic that each brand’s site received for the month of October 2011.

Amazon captured 0.16% of all referred traffic from Social sites, Qantas 0.052% and Huggies Australia 0.011%. The right column (Clicks Reliance) puts this into perspective by identifying the proportion of each site’s traffic that came from social media.

So even though Qantas received the 2nd highest amount of social traffic (0.052%), this represented only 6.85% of their overall traffic acquisition mix – meaning a relatively low reliance on social traffic.

It’s interesting to note the heavy reliance on social media by sport clubs such as Geelong and Cronulla. What’s also interesting is that the Tip Top Bakeries site, despite receiving only 10,000 visits per month, derived 42% of its traffic directly from social media for the month of October. Perhaps it has something to do with the advertising they are currently running on their Facebook page:

We’re looking forward to using the new Experian Hitwise features, and you can expect to see more in our blog about Clicks Reliance in the coming months.