The Most Expensive Traffic You Already Have: What Network Data Says About Visits from Social Media

A quick fact about your site, right away: you have about 0.3% of traffic that pays 3 times more than the rest. And a guess: you want more of this traffic, but you are looking for it in the wrong place.

That 0.3% is your social traffic – from a Facebook group, a Telegram channel, or a Reddit thread. We took 5 separate weeks of our network data spread over 6 months and checked what those visits are worth – and how to earn more from them.

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What We Measured?

Monetag handles billions of ad impressions a week, and some of them come following a link from a social platform. We decided to compare these impressions from social networks with all the rest.

We analyzed 7.2 mln social impressions and 1.9 bln other impressions on the same ad format, Direct Link. Here is what we got:

It’s not a lucky week, either. We checked 5 separate weeks between February and September. 

The gap moved between 2.2x and 5.3x, but it never closed: social traffic paid more every single time. Its share stayed between 0.3% and 0.5% of visits, without big jumps up or down.

Let’s now look at how much a social visit is worth in different GEOs, compared with an average social visit across the network:

The same social visit is worth more in some countries than in others. Great Britain and Australia are at the top, which is no surprise, since CPMs are higher there in general. But the 3x premium over other traffic is not a Tier 1 thing only. It shows up across the network, so a site with mostly Tier 3 traffic gains from social visits too.

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How to Profit From Social Traffic, Then?

So, here’s the main takeaway: a social visit pays about 3 times more, almost everywhere we looked. On many sites, though, it’s only a small part of all visits. Why? We asked Ioannis Giouroukakis, Head of Publishers at Monetag:

So a small social share usually means a loyal audience, not a weak site. The loyal audience is already there, and social visits come on top of it and pay more. Here’s how to bring more of them.

1. Make sharing easy on every page. Share buttons don’t get clicked often, but they cost nothing, so keep them on every page. More often, people share by copying the link or through the phone’s own share menu. So open your site on a phone and check both: the buttons work, and the link people copy is clean and leads to the right page. Mobile is more than half of all web traffic, so this is where sharing mostly happens.

2. Fix how your link looks in a feed. When someone shares your link on Facebook, Telegram, or X, the platform goes to your page and looks for Open Graph tags. Those tags are special lines in your site’s code that say which headline to show, text, and picture to show alongside the link. 

If the tags are there, your link looks like a card with an image, title, and a short description, but otherwise it will be a naked web address, barely noticeable and not worth a click.

3. Use the places that keep working after the post dies. A regular post lives for about a day, but a pinned message, a channel description, a bio link, or a reply under a popular comment might keep bringing people for months.

4. Go where the topic is already being discussed. One useful answer in a niche community can beat ten posts to a page nobody follows. So, if you add something people need to a discussion, and then, natively and naturally, leave your link to the page that says more – this might give this page a serious boost.

5. Repost the same links. It’s okay to take a page you shared six months ago and share it again. A post disappears from the feed in a day, and nobody scrolls back, so almost everyone who sees it this time is seeing it for the first time. One good page can keep bringing visits every few months.

6. Start with the pages that people share. Not every page is equally worth pushing. We looked at what kind of content pulled the most valuable social visitors, and here is the order:

7. Post short videos that lead back to the page. Reels, Shorts, and TikTok-style clips are what platforms push into recommendations right now. Instagram says it directly: most of what people see in Reels comes from accounts they don’t follow. So a short video reaches people who have never heard of you. Marketers agree: in HubSpot’s data, short-form video is the format with the highest ROI. Take the most interesting bit of a page, turn it into a short clip, and put the link where the platform allows it: in the bio, a pinned comment, or the description.

8. Let other people talk about you. People trust a real user or a creator more than a brand account. In a Stackla survey, consumers were 2.4 times more likely to call user-generated content authentic than content made by brands. And you don’t need big names for this: according to HypeAuditor, creators with 1,000 to 10,000 followers have the highest engagement rate on both Instagram and TikTok. A mention from someone whose followers already care about your topic can bring visitors your own posts would never reach.

9. Boost what already works. Before spending anything on paid social, look at which of your posts already brought visits on their own. Hootsuite recommends exactly this: put a small budget behind your top post of the week or month, because a post that already got organic engagement has proof it works. Then retarget people who already visited your site or engaged with your content. A proven post is a safer bet than a new one.

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What’s Next?

So you have done all of the above, and your social traffic has increased. How to monetize it?

Our stats back this up: 

And here, we described in detail how our publishers actually monetize it:

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To Sum It Up a Bit

So what did we learn? It turns out advertisers – and thus an ad network – are willing to pay more for a visitor who arrived from social. Also, it turns out that you don’t really need to switch on anything or totally change all your workflows to attract more social traffic.

With several quick actions and Smartlink, you have all the chances to grow your profits as if you had a sudden traffic spike from your SEO efforts.