Online readership analysis – is bigger better?

Following my post the other week regarding online readership, sparked by some aggressive sales tactics by one of our competitors, I got talking to Andrew Smith of Escherman and we agreed to jointly carry out a more extensive piece of analysis looking at 50 different online news sites.

We selected ten sites each from the following areas – UK Nationals, Business, Marketing, Technology and Consumer. There was no particular selection process, just an attempt to have a reasonably representative sample and we both hasten to state that this is a relatively limited exercise which should therefore be taken with at least a pinch of salt. Particularly since indexed urls have been used as a proxy for content as this can be impacted significantly by site structure (as stated in slide 21), with some sites having sub domains and/or a more complex content directory structure.

However at the same time with the data that is readily available we think it provides some (arguably) valuable food for thought. So after several hours of research, number crunching and graph generation here are the results (I suggest you view in full screen mode unless you have excellent eyesight):

Site data is sourced from Google for the number of indexed urls via the “site:domain” command and from AdPlanner for the traffic data.

We are effectively looking at three areas:

Readership per article – average numbers of UK page views per Google indexed url per month. Where indexed url is a proxy for the number of likely visited pieces of content.
Engagement – time spent per page to indicate how long a reader is likely to be spending reading that content when they get there.
UK Relevance – what proportion of the sites readers as a whole come from the UK and would therefore be likely to be relevant if you were trying to reach a UK audience.
Andrew has provided his take on the results from a PR perspective here. For my part the highlights are:
Readership
Unsurprisingly readership per article is much higher for UK Nationals and Consumer than the sector specific publications. However within the performance of UK Nationals and Consumer a handful of sites stood out for having particularly high UK traffic per article being, in order, News of the World, Heat, The Sun, The Mail, Closer Online and Marie Claire.
Interestingly though if you remove these six high scoring sites from the samples then the sector specific sites still achieve, on average, between 30-60% of the readership per article of the remaining UK Nationals or Consumer titles.
Within the sector specific titles there were equally some significant differences in results with Techcrunch Europe, The Register and T3 being at the top end in views per url in Technology; Marketing Week and NMA in Marketing; and is4profit, Startups, Businesszone and Real Business above the average in the Business group.
Engagement
The top six engagement scores were achieved, in order, by Reuters UK, Information Age, Financial Times, Business Zone, The Independent and The Register. A very different result to the readership per url figures.
This difference was further underlined with the Business and Technology sites achieving on average approximately twice the time spent as Consumer sites. Evidence for both more in depth content and greater engagement, which doesn’t seem surprising.
Relevance
There are significant differences within each group with regards to proportion of UK traffic. Within UK Nationals the tabloids are generally between 60-75% UK based with the qualities between 30-55%; the FT having the lowest UK traffic proportion with 31%.
Within Business titles the vast majority of sites are UK focussed and because of this their audiences are predominantly UK based also. The exception being The Economist with only 7% of its audience being from the UK according to AdPlanner. Interestingly this seems to reflect the broad geographical interest of its content with even the US only accounting for just over a third of its traffic.
Its a similar picture within the Marketing titles with the vast majority of traffic to the sites selected being UK based. The marketing publication with the lowest UK proportion is Econsultancy with 57% from the UK. This in in part due to around 20% being from the US which seems consistent with their having a US presence.
Finally Technology and Consumer titles have quite varied levels of UK traffic with sites such as Techcrunch Europe and Vogue.co.uk (clearly having the potential for interest from outside the UK) having lower proportions of UK traffic at around 20-40% compared to sites such as T3 and Heat which are between 75-100%.
Conclusions
Though limited the analysis provides evidence for savvy PR people who already know that it is important to ensure that you understand the publications they engage with and their potential to actually reach the readers and communities most relevant to them and their clients and not be blinded by big traffic numbers.
There are many other points that could be drawn out of the results and we would love to get feedback from people on anything they observe or suggestions as to how to refine the analysis and improve the validity of the results.
Notes
The other publications analysed not mentioned above were:
UK Nationals
Business
Marketing
Technology
Consumer

Online Visibility-its not the size of your traffic that counts

At RealWire we have recently become aware that a major wire service is making a big deal out of their website’s high traffic numbers. In fact they have been specifically targeting the market trying to argue that their service is hugely better where visibility is concerned.

However they don’t mention the following three crucial issues about the traffic to their site.

1. That volume of traffic is clearly going to be affected by quantity of content.

2. The time visitors actually spend reading their content.

3. The relevance of those visitors to the content.

At RealWire we are always keen to make sure that discussions are based around the facts so let’s look at each of these in turn to see how our readership, engagement and relevance are all in fact apparently superior to Big Wire Corp’s.

Quantity of content

Q: Which is the more “popular” of the following two sites?

Site A – 1 piece of content and 1,000 page views in a month
Site B –  1 million pieces of content and 1 million page views in a month

Well according to their literature Big Wire Corp would apparently see Site B as a more popular destination because it has 1,000 times more page views. Makes sense, bigger is better right? Wrong.

Site A’s one piece of content has been viewed 1,000 times, whereas each of Site B’s stories has only be viewed once on average. Now which site is more popular? Site A of course.

Now let’s apply this concept to Big Wire Corp’s website.

First of all let’s get an idea of volume of content. The Google “Site:[url]” command gives you the number of unique pages indexed by Google on a particular site – a good proxy for the amount of content.

In this case the answer is 406,000.

Next we need an idea of traffic to the site. Google AdPlanner provides estimates of monthly page views.

In this case the answer is 7.5 million

I we then divide page views by content, we get an estimate of the number of views per article per month. Answer 18.5.

RealWire’s equivalent data from the same sources is
Content – 5,500
Page views – 200,000* (less than 3% of Big Wire Corp’s figure)

This gives 36.4 page views per article per month.

Twice the Big Wire Corp figure suggesting RealWire has higher readership for each article.

*I happen to know that the page view figure is too high in RealWire’s case (we do have analytics of course) but it could equally also be so for Big Wire Corp and so until I can get a hold of actual numbers for them I am being consistent.

Engagement

Q: Which of these two sites is engaging its readership the most?

Site A – average time spent on each page 2 minutes

Site B – average time spent on each page 5 seconds

Site A obviously. Each of the readers are spending 24 times longer reading an article on average than on Site B.

So let’s apply this to Big Wire Corp again.

Again Google AdPlanner can help. It tells us how many visits the site receives and how long each one lasts. From this we can get Time spent per Page as follows:

Time spent on page calculation

Big Wire Corp numbers

Time spent per visit = 3 minutes 50 seconds (230 seconds)
Total page views = 7.5 million
Total visits = 3.5 million

Time spent per page = 107.5 seconds or 1 minute 47.5 seconds

RealWire numbers

Time spent per visit = 8 minutes (480 seconds)
Total page views = 200,000
Total visits = 64,000

Time spent per page = 153.6 seconds or 2 minutes 33.6 seconds

43% more than Big Wire Corp suggesting readers of RealWire content are more engaged.

Relevance

Q: Which of these two sites is most likely to have the most relevant readership to a UK relevant story?

Site A – 100% of visits from the UK

Site B – 1% of visits from the UK

A: Site A – Yes I know these are getting ridiculously easy now! :-)

Big Wire Corp’s market report focusses on US usage of their site when comparing themselves to others such as RealWire. However given that the vast majority of their content is from US companies it will come as no surprise that the vast majority of their traffic does as well. Google Ad Planner again helps us out.

US traffic – 76% of total

But the majority of RealWire’s clients and therefore content are from the UK. So what’s Big Wire Corp’s UK traffic like?

UK traffic – 3% of total.

And RealWire’s UK traffic? Well AdPlanner estimates around 75% but the real figure is nearer 45% or 15 times the Big Wire Corp figure.

Suggesting that RealWire’s traffic is around 15 times more likely to be relevant.

Conclusion

When evaluating traffic between sites it is imperative that you don’t get drawn in by the size of headline traffic numbers and that you consider:

a) normalising traffic for levels of content

b) how engaged the readers are

c) how relevant the readers are

Or you could find yourself reaching some very misleading conclusions. Just ask Big Wire Corp :-)

* Hattip to Andrew B Smith for highlighting the value of Google Adplanner for such analysis

PR Week Top 150 2010 – 0.75 per cent up or 10 per cent down?

0_300_300_http---offlinehbpl.hbpl.co.uk-misc-ORP-PromoItemsRight3-Top150_2010ButtonPR Week published its 2010 league table of the Top 150 PR agencies in the UK last week. The main headline was that overall the agency market was estimated to have grown by 0.75 per cent during 2009.

As comforting as this figure might be to all of us working in, or with, the PR industry my own take on the figures suggests that the picture may not have been quite so rosy.  I estimate that a reduction of around 5-10 per cent is probably a more realistic range and is more consistent with David Brain’s analysis yesterday from a global perspective.

This conclusion is based on an analysis of the changing make up of the table and other supporting evidence.

For clarity PR Week’s 2010 league table is based on income generated in calendar year 2009. Similarly the 2009 league table is based on income generated in calendar year 2008.

Analysis of the league table positions

The table below shows the income that an agency had to achieve in each of the last two years in order to be ranked at the particular positions shown in the league table;

Position

2008 income £’m
(2009 League Table)

2009 income £’m
(2010 League Table)

Change

10th

18.92

16.49

-12.8%

25th

8.35

7.52

-9.9%

50th

4.79

4.10

-14.4%

75th

2.87

2.64

-8.0%

100th

1.80

1.63

-9.4%

150th

1.14

0.44

-61.4%

The table shows that to achieve a particular position in 2010 requires significantly less income at all levels compared to the 2009 league table. For instance to be ranked 25th in the table this year required an income of £7.52m, but to achieve the same position last year require £8.35m, a 9.9 per cent reduction.

Excluding the change at the 150th position the reductions are between 8.0 and 14.4 per cent with an average of 10.9 per cent.

In producing this table I have made adjustments for new entrants and mergers to make it more accurate:

2010 New entrants

Of the agencies that were new entrants into the Top 150 this year six of them would have been included in last years list had they submitted their figures. I have added these into 2009’s list for consistency.

Mergers

The numbers are also affected by the mergers of Grayling/Trimedia, Ketchum/Pleon and Tonic/Huntsworth Health. In these cases I have also combined the income for the three combinations in 2009’s list as well in order to compare like with like.

Other evidence that doesn’t fit with the headline estimate

Agencies joining and leaving the list – is it a fully representative sample?

It would appear that Stephen Waddington’s challenge to the industry to submit their numbers for the benefit of all has gone unanswered by some. 30 agencies (excluding those that have merged) that were in the top 150 last year do not appear in the 2010 league table.

Between them these agencies had total income in 2008 of £67.2m and varied in size between £13.80m and £1.13m. Given that the 150th position agency in the 2010 league table has income of £0.44m these agencies would have needed to have suffered a reduction in income of between 61 per cent and 97 per cent to have not made the cut.

This seems highly unlikely and what I suspect is more likely is that these agencies just didn’t submit figures this year. Obviously individual agencies could have any number of reasons why they chose not to, or were unable to, submit figures. However the absence of 20 per cent of last year’s list begs the question as to whether relying on just those who have submitted represents a valid sample. Have some agencies chosen not to submit numbers for fear of how they might look? Is the table therefore more likely to be biased towards those that performed better?

It is impossible to calculate a sensible estimate of the impact of these absences, but it does seem reasonable to question whether the sample, that the 0.75 per cent growth figure was based on, is truly representative.

Performance of the major Marcoms groups PR brands

The major global Marcoms groups that publish figures for PR specifically performed as follows in 2009:

Like for Like change in income
WPP

-7.4%
Interpublic

-4.5%
Omnicom

-10.6%
WPP is organic change from 2009 analyst report
Interpublic from PR Week article 17 March 2010
Omnicom is organic change from 2009 analyst report

It is obviously possible that the UK elements of these businesses performed better than the rest of the world. However given that the UK recession was amongst the longest and deepest and in the absence of any specific data to the contrary, I would take these figures as they stand.

Between them these three groups account for approximately £2bn in PR revenues worldwide and these figures would also indicate a reduction of approximately 5-10 per cent.

Conclusion

It was clearly going to be a challenge for PR Week to pull together a robust analysis this year due to the optional submission nature of the list. However I think there is significant evidence to suggest that the headline performance of slight growth is more than a little misleading.

But what do agency heads think? Is my estimate of minus 5-10 per cent nearer the mark?

PR needs a car not a faster horse – designers required

half_horse_half_car-12038 I read a really great post last night from Tim Dyson, CEO of Next Fifteen about the need for true innovation in the PR industry through great design. Innovation of the Henry Ford game changing variety, the car – not just the incremental change that we currently see i.e. a faster horse.

By coincidence I had been talking about a specific example of this earlier yesterday at the Social Media World Forum – my topic the Social Media News Release (SMNR).

In my presentation (below) I also highlighted the need for design* where PR content was concerned and that as of now the best attempt to date has been the Social Media News Release (hattip Mr Todd Defren). But like Tim I concluded that despite being one of the first to implement the template, it still only represents an incremental improvement over the press release – evolution not revolution.

The PR community (including us) needs to find even better ways to design our content and its packaging to suit a world that has many different audiences/communities, is increasingly accessing content across mobile platforms and is suffering from an overload of messages.

We, RealWire, also announced yesterday the results of research into the extent to which multimedia content is used to enhance press releases. The research found that of a sample of almost 3,000 press releases across six newswires only 13 per cent included any kind of “multimedia” (if you ignore company logos) and that in fact for the vast majority this was just a picture. Only 3 per cent included any other form of content e.g. audio/video etc and only 2 per cent included content that was hosted on social media platforms. You can hear me talking about these findings in more detail here. (For information RealWire’s comparative figures were 46 per cent, 11 per cent and 7 per cent respectively).

The research suggests that a substantial proportion of the PR community is not yet even making full use of the incremental innovations such as the SMNR, as well as the generic social media platforms. Given this lack of adoption of these new tools what do people think is the game changing solution that will get us to take our driving tests?

* favourite part of this video is Nick Leon between 1.45-2.15

Hattips for title of presentation to Greg Jarboe and Seth Godin

Social Media News Release – A Press Release for the Online World or a Meatball Sundae

View more presentations from RealWire.

An Inconvenient PR Truth – a campaign to reduce PR spam

We have launched a campaign today that aims to address the issue of irrelevant press release emails. To learn more watch the video below and then visit the An Inconvenient PR Truth website if you would like to get involved in the debate.

Update: We have posted answers to the main FAQs regarding the animation here. The debate has also moved onto PRWeek UK here.