Audi’s recent ad campaign earmarked 0.5% of the budget on blog ads. Those ads produced 29% of the overall traffic sent to the ad landing page.

I found Dave Pell’s comments on this curious:

Those of us who are addicted to sifting through our own blog stats are quite aware of the fact that a link from a blog often drives a whole lot more traffic than a mention in a mainstream pub. Now marketers are starting to figure this out.

I’m not “addicted” to checking stats, but being this is part of our business, naturally we keep track. These numbers tend to flucuate quite a bit, but if linked enough times average numbers start to develope.

Here is a small sampling of blog and news sources and the approximate amount in unique visitors received at Hmm (the first day unless otherwise denoted), the number in parenthesis is the times used to calculate these approximations. The traffic from all sites have a significant dropoff off the second and subsequent days as the links are pushed off the main page and into the archives. Some sites have pretty good archive traffic.

slashdot (2) - 10,000
spiegel.de news (1) - 5,000
CNET news (1) - 225
scoble.weblogs.com (5+) - 125
Metafilter (1) - 100
scripting.com (3) - 90
digg.com, non-frontpage (5+) - 25-50
Blogcritics (dozens) - 15-25
cinematical.com top 20 commenter link - 10 per day

The amount of unique visitors sent doesn’t always indicate overal traffic flow or site popularity. Take for instance Blogcritics, one of the very few blog Google News sources, which publishes dozens of articles/reviews/posts per day from a wide variety of writers and does some 50,000+ unique visitors per day as of this writing. The amount of traffic received from a story at Blogcritics can vary wildly from a few hits to hundreds.

Mainstream news source links have produced a good amount of traffic comparatively to blogs in our experience, but I’d be the first one to admit that site visitor patterns vary from site to site and even day to day in the case of some blogs.

Bottom line: read others often, link others often, including but not limited to blogs, mainstream news, and interesting/useful sites. What comes around goes around.

• Congrats to Blogcritics for 10 million visitors
• Some bloggers worry too much about traffic
• How much should your blog / website charge for advertising?
• Proof that Google spam fight is not a “sham”
• Kottke’s Digg vs. Slashdot traffic comparison
• Yahoo blog search hide and don’t seek yet