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Anatomy of a Blog Tour - Startling Stats from Mary DeMuth’s 6 Week Tour

October 8th, 2007 | blogging, blogtour, marketing, networking

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Who knows where blog tours came from? They seem to be especially prevalent in the CBA, and I’ve been trying to figure out ways to make them work. It tain’t easy, folks.

If you are a writer looking to help the publisher sell your book, you need to read this post. If you are a blogger looking to see what social media can do, you need to read this post. If you are a publisher, looking to see how social media can help you sell books, you need to read this post.

THEN after you read the post, take the amazing TRUE FALSE TEST ABOUT BLOG TOURS!

What We Had Planned…

Tina Howard organized, get this, 85 bloggers to post about Mary DeMuth’s new book, Authentic Parenting, over a six week period. (Not all of them ended up posting, but still.) Mary, Tina, and I talked about specific goals for the tour. In addition to raising awareness of the book, we hoped to actually measure the effect the tour had on sales.

We all put a lot of time into this. Mary commented on every post in the tour. She talked with Tina and I on the phone quite a bit. And Tina was an absolute work horse. She estimated that she spent 40-50 hours working on this tour. I’ve probably spent 30-40 myself–most of that writing posts and sorting through the data in spreadsheets.

Like good direct marketers, we set up a landing page at Mary’s blog and asked bloggers to link there. (Mary has since taken the page down. More on that later.)

Everyone should know this up front. Mary didn’t pay Tina or me. We worked as her friends. She also didn’t pay any bloggers, but she did send 30 review copies of her book.

Tina sent out these astoundingly meticulous notes ahead of time. She was very organized, reminding people before their post was set to go live, and writing up everyone’s activities at the end of each week. Here is a sample of the summary from week one and her final summary for the entire tour. Also, Tina posted the lessons she learned from the tour this morning.bloggers and google pagerank

People posted in a variety of ways. And we asked them to write two posts: one review and one direct buy. I take full responsibility for this advice to Mary because previous blog tour tests had shown that short posts with a direct call to action send more traffic.

Tina also gathered data on every blog. Google Rank. Technorati Authority. Number of comments. Number of posts. Type of posts. Whether they used a picture. All of that.

For example, the pie chart in the sidebar shows the bloggers sorted by their Google Pagerank. (You’ll notice that there are only 53 blogs. That’s due in part to some folks not posting.)

A few things to notice about the range of participants whose stats I included in the study. There were a tremendous number of new blogs participating. That accounts for the 26.4% of participants who had a Google PageRank of 0.

For the stat geeks, there was a much lower correlation between Google PageRank and traffic referrals this time. A disappointing 0.316. I don’t know if that is high enough to suggest we look at Google PageRank as an accurate predictor of traffic or not.

What Actually Happened…

All of the statistics were gathered via Google Analytics from July 15 to September 9, 2007. Mary DeMuth is some kind of saint for allowing me to share her data publicly like this.

She said, “There’s no reason to keep this stuff to ourselves.”

Amen, sister. Let the light shine on a hill so the whole world can see. (Er, maybe I’m confusing metaphors there.)

1) The Bottom Line in Traffic Referrals as measured in unique users to relevantblog.

Of the total 4672 visitors, 3457 were referrals, and 721 were specifically referred by someone participating in the blog tour.

That means a healthy 74% of Mary’s traffic comes from direct referrals. What a testament to her credibility with readers! And 15% of Mary’s traffic came as a direct result of the blog tour.

However you splice it, those 721 contacts would not have been made without the blog tour. For blogs with lower traffic, that number would have been an even more significant percentage of the overall traffic.

2) The Bottom Line Regarding Where Those Referrals Landed.

You’re probably wondering, “How many of those referrals actually sent people to the landing page Mary designed?” That is a good question. I’m glad you asked.

During the blog tour, 178 people entered Mary’s site through the landing page she created. It was a direct sale page titled “Buy Authentic Parenting From Me.” (Mary took the page down after the tour. Now it just sends people to her homepage for relevantblog.)

That means only 25% of the blog tour referrals actually went where we hoped they would. Most of them seem to have clicked through to Mary’s blog homepage.

There are a few reasons why this might have happened. Perhaps the readers didn’t click on the title of her book. Perhaps the readers were skeptical of the “direct sale” link. Perhaps the participating bloggers–especially the ones with higher Google PageRanks–didn’t feel comfortable using the direct sale link we asked them to use.

Mea culpa, I suppose. Sigh.

3) The Bottom Line in Book Purchases

Here’s where the money hits the road. Or something like that.

We’ll start with the bad news. Mary only sold 11 books from her direct sale page. Ouch. This is an abysmally small percentage of all traffic during the tour. 0.2% of all visitors.

Of course, a lot of that traffic didn’t make it to the landing page. People who came to Mary’s site through the landing page were much more likely to be open to the purpose of the direct sale page. Let’s face it, when we click on the title of a book in a review, we know we’re going to Amazon or some similar kind of store.

The landing page had a total of 243 unique visitors during the tour. That means Mary had a 4.5% conversion rate on that page. That’s pretty good, really. Unfortunately, it means she would need much, much higher traffic to the page in order to generate sales of any significance. For example, to sell 500 books at that conversion rate, she’d need 11,111 unique visitors to the landing page alone.

That kind of traffic is probably not realistic for a blog tour. It might be realistic over a longer period of time. But blog tours don’t seem to work well over long periods of time. Which brings me to the surprises.

Two Surprises We Didn’t Anticipate…

1) Posting more than once per blog is completely, absolutely, definitively COUNTERPRODUCTIVE.

The 721 direct referrals from the blog tour came from 140 separate posts. One blogger linked to Mary five times! But 83% of bloggers posted only once or twice during the tour.

Basically, the more you post, the less effective each individual post becomes as a source of traffic to your intended destination. This isn’t much of a surprise really. The more I repeat myself on a blog, the more people will tend to ignore what I say. Repetition doesn’t work. Period.

Here’s a chart that shows it. The x axis shows the number of posts from each blog; the y axis shows the average # of clicks per blog and post:

repetitive links have bad click through

Although the blogs that posted two and four times sent more traffic than the blogs that posted only once, they did so across many more posts. So their average click through rate per post was much lower. (The extremely low traffic from blogs posting three times is likely due to the disproportionate number of low traffic blogs that posted that many times.)

2) The host of a blog tour can experience significant, permanent INCREASES in traffic.

This was the biggest surprise of all to me. Tina’s blog has 60% more traffic now than she did before the tour. It will be interesting to see if those numbers go down in October and November.

This also suggests that authors should consider running blog tours from their own blogs. Give admin rights to people like Tina and let them run the tour from your blog.

So where does that leave us?

A Final Story

Because blogs provide real statistics, we have to face those statistics. I’m not trying to be down on blog tours here. I’m not trying to embarrass Tina or Mary or myself. I wish the blog tour had been a rousing success. I wish Mary had sold hundreds of books. Personally, I feel a bit like I failed Mary and Tina with the advice I gave. But then, I’m egotistical that way.

However, the blogosphere is still the Wild West. I saw 3:10 to Yuma several weeks ago. A fun bit of fantasy, and a good parable for people in the blogosphere. Just like Christian Bale in the small frontier town, we’re still fighting anarchy out here. There are a lot of swaggering braggarts. There are a lot of people flashing their guns. And there are even a few black hats running around with their gangs causing trouble and making a lot of people scared to come out here.

The train doesn’t come out this far yet. But some of us are slugging it out, trying to build the tracks, trying to make sense of this crazy place and help connect it to the real world, the civilized world.

In the meantime, should you stop running blog tours? Heck no! Don’t give up. But don’t have false expectations either. This place is still wild. The only thing you have out here is your own integrity and honor.

Mary has integrity and honor. So does Tina. (I’m a schmuck, but you already knew that.)

Now go take the true/false quiz to see if you understood any of this.

Now some questions for you to think about.

Publishers, what are you thinking? Do blogs fit into your marketing plan in any measurable way? What traditional element of publishing seems most analogous to blogs?

Writers, what are you thinking? What have you heard about blogs and marketing? What steps are you taking to enter the blogosphere? If you are avoiding it entirely, why?

Readers, what are you thinking? When you go to a blog and find a “blog tour post,” what do you do? Do you click through? Do you read the post at all? Another way to put this might be: what do you expect from the blogs you read? Why do you read them?


Viewing 37 Comments

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    No, you are not what you called yourself. Just for the record.

    When I go to a blog and find a tour post, I usually ignore it. Just being honest. I comment about something else, simply because I don't want my blog friend to feel bad that I ignored his/her post. I can't remember ever clicking through.

    Why do I read? For inspiration, or information. Or just to connect to my blog friend.
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    Marcus,

    Thanks to you and Tina for all your tireless work. I so appreciate it. I wish the tour would've been some sort of rip roaring success, but at least we took a risk!

    Blessings,
    Mary
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    It's interesting. I've wondered if blog tours really work. And yes, the numbers don't lie, but they also don't tell the whole story. You got Mary's name out a LOT. The sales may come down the road. People might remember the book and pick it up in a store later, so 11 books isn't a final count. Also, blog tours are lots of work but nothing compared to driving to a bookstore for a signing, or buying ads, or the hustling you have to do to try and get publicity in a newspaper or magazine, so yes, work, but be careful what you compare it to.
    Thanks for the post.
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    I love reading this side of things. I write a weekly review column on 5Minutesformom.com (with a 6 Page Rank), so I work with some blog tours but with often directly with publishers and authors.

    One thing that I've noticed is that word of mouth takes a while. For example, I just recently posted on my personal blog a followup to a children's series--4 more books had been released, in addition to the first two, which I had reviewed months ago. People keep saying "I've heard of these books, and they sound great!" because the word of mouth has sunk in.

    People rarely buy a book I've reviewed immediately (through my amazon link at least), but sometimes I'll see it come through a month or two later.

    I just posted a review of a book today on 5M4M that I had done on my site in conjunction with a 30 site tour. Overwhelmingly, people are commenting, "I remember seeing this book around and I'm interested."

    I would be curious to see if more buy it now.

    I don't know if this makes sense, but my point is that there's no way to track sales based on the word of mouth. People could walk into a bookstore in two months, see the familiar cover and buy the book.
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    I've participated in a number of product reviews and book reviews . . . but none of them (besides Mary's tour) actually requested that I suggest the readers buy the product. They are meant more to produce a sort of buzz and product recognition, I suppose. Since big companies do this (think: General Mills, Nicholas Sparks' new book), I have to think it makes sense from a marketing standpoint. But what do I know? I'm just in it for the free stuff. ;)
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    Marcus,
    Thanks so much for all of your advice and number crunching! I don't think you ever steered us wrong; we had to try some stuff out. I enjoyed reading the analysis, and I definitely know some things I'd try differently the next time around.
    I have to say I agree with LL, that I often skip over blog tour posts unless it's short enough for me to skim or catches my eye with something meaningful to me (usually aligned with why I visit that blog anyway). Your recent posts on the CSFF tour are great examples. I read them since you took an interesting slant to the review, while I normally skip over them.
    Anyway, I've enjoyed working with you on this project, and hope we'll get to work on something again in the future. In the meantime, I'll be reading your blogs, tour postings and otherwise. . .
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    This study is fascinating, and I'm sorry too that it wasn't more successful.

    But there's one thing that can't be measured through this - name recognition. Mary's name was out there, exposed, gaining recognition daily for all those weeks.

    Who knows how that will pay off in the long run, but it MUST count for something and may be the only significant outcome as a whole. And name recognition is a good portion of the platform as a whole, isn't it?

    Thanks for sharing with us, and for working so hard to make it successful. Mary, thanks again for being authentic and transparent. You're a blessing to all of us!
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    Maybe the effect of the blogtour isn't just for the period of time that it's ongoing. What's on those blogs are on public domain and until we take them down, anyone who searches on parenting books or on Mary would be led to one of the blogs participating in the tour.

    While sales are a good thing, I think it would be interesting to find out how much the blogtour has contributed to name recognition (author and book).

    I do read reviews (yes, even on blogs) and when I pass a bookstore and see a familiar name, I tend to stop and think...hey, where have I seen that name before. Name recognition will make me stop, pick up the book, look at the blurb and maybe leaf through before making a decision on whether to buy or not to buy.

    Just my two cents.
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    This is interesting information. Since I participate in a couple of blog tours, it will influence how I will post in those from now on. I will be watching for any more info you may come up regarding this.
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    Wow! You guys commented quickly. Thanks, Tina, for sending out that email. I'll respond to everyone in kind later tonight or tomorrow.
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    Who defines success anyway? I think just getting the word out on 53 blogs is success!

    And if I ever get a book published you can give the blog tour experiment/advice thing another try! :)
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    Thanks so much for sharing this information. It will impact what I do as a blog participant in the future. I LOVE spreading the word about good books, but want to make sure I'm actually helping the authors, and not just taking a free book from them.

    Also as a debut author, it's great information to have as I consider endeavors like blog tours. Thanks for sharing!
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    I, too, am a believer in name recognition and word of mouth. Instead of giving my review copy away on my blog, I passed it on to a young woman who is daughterly to us. She and her husband have four kids, and she is very active in her church and her children's activities. If she liked the book (I can't imagine her not), her recommendation will pass through a whole community of moms.
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    L.L., can't I be just a little bit of a schmuck? I've always wanted to be... Information, Inspiration, and Friendship. Those are good reasons to read and blog.

    Mary, we love you! I will say this. For all my talk of failure, I think your tour was the most successful I've seen. We just tried to take it a step further into direct sales. Eh. So it didn't work. I don't think we lost credibility with anyone. We said what we were trying to do. Now we've shared that it didn't work particularly well. Back to the drawing board. I always liked to draw anyway.

    Mary Connealy, thanks for stopping by! You're right, of course. Mary's got a lot of exposure from this tour. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that the book really is that good.

    Jennifer, great to see you here! You are absolutely right. I was just hoping we could measure word of mouth in 6 weeks. I'm not sure how to measure it over a longer period... at least, not with just one title. Your comment is very encouraging, thanks!

    Mel, in retrospect asking for the direct buy was a gutsier move than I realized. The main point was to see if we could measure how the buzz translated into sales. But then a lot of traditional book marketing doesn't measure the direct relationships between a particular strategy and the sales. It's a tricky business.

    spaghettipie/Tina, you did most of the hard work on the tour. And Mary did the really hard work of writing an excellent book. Thanks for the thoughts about my last few posts on CSFF. I was just trying to have fun writing them. I figure if they aren't fun for me, they won't be fun for any readers.

    Tracy, Mary's tour was as successful as any blog tour I've seen so far. It just wasn't successful regarding specific, measurable sales. Name recognition is what books are about. I think Mary may be reaching the tipping point in that regard.

    rcloenen-ruiz, I agree completely. In fact, Marketing Experiments ran a test comparing social media campaigns with google ads. The social media campaign took longer to build, but continued to drive traffic several months after they stopped engaging the blogosphere. Whereas the traffic from google shut off the moment they stopped running ads. Your comment about name recognition for the author and the book is spot on. But how do you measure that?

    Jason, good to see you, friend! It is liberating to know we can just post once. In fact, we should post just once. Then we can spend the other days commenting.

    Gina, the total number was closer to 70 before I took out anomalies. I'll be happy to do whatever I can to help you out in the future!

    Cara, I think the key to helping the authors is to be completely transparent and honest about your reviews. Too often, bloggers sugarcoat everything on the tour and mess up the credibility of the entire process. We need to remember that all press is good press. And hey, what's your new book? Be sure to share a link!
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    Karen, passing the book on is a great idea. My wife is a MOPS organizer, so I'm thinking she should share it with everyone at their next MOPS meeting.
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    I posted the tour on both of my blogs, and neither has a large # of commenters....HOWEVER, you never know who reads and then remembers later to purchase the book.

    I'm also one of those who said a downside was not receiving a copy of the book. I'll be honest: this was the first blog tour I'd ever been asked to participate in, WITHOUT being given a book. I guess I'd been spoiled before, huh? :-) That didn't stop me from purchasing two copies, though: one locally and one through Mary's site.
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    You did a lot of data gathering in your experiment and I applaud your tenacity.

    A few things that you should take into consideration:

    Page Rank is not always indicitive of your progress. PageRank is acquired by an algorithm of direct permanent links into your page and the "quality" of those links. For example if you have 50 people linking to your page and they all have a PageRank of one or two, you will actually have a lower PageRank than if you have 15 people with a page rank of nine linking to you. Also outgoing links on your page actually "leak" PageRank. So PageRank isn't all that important to a tour.

    Next, you didn't supply the Amazon statistics for sales during that period, so you could have possibly sold many more books that you didn't have figures for.

    Also I would ask what link did you use for the book for the tour? Did you use the Amazon product link, or did you use the book direct link? The reason I asked this is because you also didn't include the ranking that you achieved on the Technorati Popular Book Page. That page is viewed by close to a hundred thousand people a day, and uses the direct book link to rank the popularity of books being discussed on the internet.

    And lastly direct sales marketing is a marathon event rather that the sprint. The agent, Terry Whalin dedicates most of his Writing Life blog to teaching direct marketing. It takes a lot longer than a blog tour to get positive results to direct marketing. But it is a great beginning. Mary should leave her landing page up and expand it to all of her books not just one.

    Like you said, many people would rather buy from Amazon than from a personal site. but you created a book buzz, got peole involved, and collected stats on a lot of page views. That kind of advertising is worth a million bucks in the industry! Cudos

    -Bonnie Calhoun, Dir. of Christian Fiction Blog Alliance
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    Pattie, we watched the number of comments too. There were a total of 312 comments. That has 0.33 direct correlation with traffic referrals 0.33. The last study I did of blog tours suggested that comments had a very low correlation with the click through rate. This one suggests otherwise.

    Of course, I could just as easily use comments to measure "buzz." But the publishers I've met with are more interested in bottom line sales. They are tired of buzz promises that don't generate any revenue in the form of book sales.

    It all comes back to my decision to try to apply direct marketing wisdom to organized events in the blogosphere.
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    Bonnie,

    Thanks for your comments. I have a lot of admiration for your work.

    About PageRank... In some past studies I've done, PageRank indeed proved to be an indication of the potential traffic a blog receives. (I was surprised.) As you point out, it is only one indicator. For Mary's tour, we used RankWhere to measure the rank of the participating blogs. And as I said in the post, the correlation to traffic referrals was only 0.316. About the same as comments this time.

    (I've never heard that outgoing links "leak" PageRank. Where did you hear that?)

    About Amazon.com... We didn't link to Amazon because we wanted to measure what people did when they clicked through to the book or the site itself. Here's what we found about click throughs in general:

    * They spent an average of 4 minutes, 24 seconds on Mary's site.
    * They viewed 1.5 pages of Mary's site.
    * 70% bounced. (Which seems to contradict the first stat.)
    * 56% were new to Mary's site. (That's 403 people who came to the site for the first time as a direct result of this tour.)
    * 178 people clicked through to the direct buy link directly. Before they clicked, they wouldn't have known whether it was going to Amazon or what (mostly likely).

    The publishers I've spoken to view Amazon statistics with skepticism. But even if Amazon sold a million books during the blog tour, there's no way to say those books were sold as a result of this tour and not some other marketing event. I wanted to gather as much real, verifiable data as possible.

    About Technorati... I hate to say this, but I don't pay any attention to Technorati Popular Books. Becky and I have talked about it before for the CSFF blog tour. I don't think the stat has much meaning, so I haven't studied it. Mainly, I'm skeptical that you can't easily navigate to the page from