Telegraph.co.uk's traffic bonanza is prompting quite a bit of interest. How, exactly, does a site add five million unique users on one month?
Telegraph digital editor Ed Roussel said it was down to under-the-bonnet changes that have improved the speed and stability of the site, combined with a very lively flow of news (from Carla Bruni to the failing economy) which played well with the site's audience. That, and the site is pumping out 50% more news than this time last year.
Convinced yet?
Photo by Topgold on Flickr. Some rights reserved.
I checked that no major changes have been made to the measurement on the site. Because the traffic figures are audited by ABCe, any changes in metrics would have applied to all the news sites anyway.
I checked with Nielsen Online, and their data, though producing very different figures, shows a similar growth spurt for Telegraph.co.uk in March: 69% year-on-year from March 2007 to March 2008, and a 40% increase from the previous month.
Video has been a big part of their success, search engine optimisation has been ramped up and the credit crunch has been a big traffic driver - especially with those Google AdWords bought up next to each news related search term.
The same could be said of pretty much all the major news sites.
So what's the deal?
We think it's overseas traffic. One source said that as much as four million of that five million in extra traffic could be from overseas.
Breakdowns of the UK vs international traffic split show a sizeable leap from February to March: the volume of overseas users has increased from 57.4% in January to 59.4% in February to 64.6% in March.
So it makes for an impressive top line, but how valuable really is that bulked up unique user figure, for any of the news sites?
On geographic breakdown for this month's ABCes, this is how things stand:
Guardian.co.uk 7,731,573 unique users
Telegraph.co.uk 6,045,285
Times Online 5,631,264
Sun Online 5,256,154
Daily Mail 5,105,385
Mirror.co.uk 2,498,613
We've written before that sites have hardly begun to exploit the potential of marketing to their overseas audience; the costs and logistic of targeting ads and campaigns to local companies and agencies perhaps seems too demanding, so they are happier to focus on the clients they know on their own turf. That's the really big challenge - turning those eyeballs into bucks.
