Startup people often ask me how much traffic we receive after being mentioned in TechCrunch. Since we’ve been on there a few times, I thought it’s be instructive to show just how much of an effect it has on our traffic.

Let’s look at two cases, the most frequent types for TechCrunch: new product announcements and funding news. (Obviously, different companies will have different results, so just use this is as one data point.)

Most recently, we were in TechCrunch for the launch of our new payment gateway Samurai. Here’s the headline:

You can see the social media stats on the left of the title, but here’s the report from Google analytics from that day:

Interestingly, only 12.5% of the day’s traffic came directly from TechCrunch. It’s not possible to break down what portion of the social media traffic came as a result of the article, but it’s arguably a substantial amount. The article posted fairly early on the morning of a Friday. Over the course of a month, that article became the 8th largest traffic referral source.

Now let’s go back in time to January 2011, when we announced a different kinds of news: funding.

This one has one fifth the Twitter love of the Samurai launch. How was traffic affected? See below:

This was posted on a Wednesday afternoon. Traffic is obviously much less in quantity, but actually represents 25% of all traffic for the day (we were much smaller back then!). Over the course of a month, the TechCrunch article was our 5th largest traffic referral source.

There are obviously other benefits to being in TechCrunch besides traffic (such as social proof, an arguably higher intent audience, etc) but in the case of traffic, it may not be as much as you think.