The stickiness of UK newspaper sites compared
Visitors to UK newspaper sites look at an average of 2.5 pages a day, according to data from Alexa. But 62.8% of users look at just one page (figures originally posted here).
In terms of daily page views per user, the Sun (4 pages), Guardian (3.1) and Telegraph (2.9) are above average. Visitors to the Mail site look at just 2.4 pages a day – so while the Mail may have come top in the July ABCe figures, maybe its large number of overseas visitors aren’t staying to look round the site.
Stickiness of UK newspaper sites
| Newspaper | Daily page views per user |
Bounce rate (%) |
| The Sun | 4 | 48.5 |
| Guardian | 3.1 | 59.2 |
| Telegraph | 2.9 | 65.2 |
| Daily Mail | 2.4 | 60.7 |
| Times Online | 2.4 | 59.7 |
| Independent | 2.2 | 70.4 |
| FT.com | 1.9 | 66.8 |
| Mirror | 1.7 | 67.5 |
| Express | 1.7 | 66.7 |
| Average | 2.5 | 62.8 |
- Better than average figures are in bold.
- The bounce rate is the percentage of visits that consisted of just one page (so a low number is good).
- These figures are 3-month averages. These change on a daily basis at Alexa – so they may have altered slightly by the time you check. Click the papers’ names to see the current data.
- The overall average at the bottom is a simple average – it has not been weighted by traffic.
Page views vs bounce rate
The table is ranked by daily page views per user. The bounce rate is another measure of stickiness. It doesn’t exactly correlate with page views, as papers may have differing proportions of loyal, engaged users who visit lots of pages. The more pages that these users visit, the better the page view figure – but they won’t affect the bounce rate.
The Telegraph has a worse bounce rate than the sites near it in the table, perhaps because the great success with its Digg tool doesn’t always lead to multi-page visits?
Using Alexa data
There are issues with using Alexa data like this as it underrepresents UK users, who may have differing usage patterns to other visitors. However, as it seems to underrepresent them more or less equally, the rankings should be OK even if the absolute figures are all out by the same margin.
6 Comments, Comment or Ping
Jon Bounds
Of course Alexa – by being an opt-in service – skews to the more technically minded user — how that affects the data (possibly skewing to the more educated) would be interesting to find out.
Aug 5th, 2009
malcolm coles
Jon – you’re right, although Alexa doesn’t JUST use the toolbar any more: http://www.alexa.com/help/traffic-learn-more.
Aug 5th, 2009
Amir
I’m sorry, but I have a problem with using Alexa Data like this. It simply is not accurate. Not even close to being accurate. According to Alexa, my website (http://www.amirkurtovic.com) has a 3-month avg bounce rate of 32.2%. Well, that is simply not true. The real number is over 60%. Alexa also has my pageviews at 6.6. The real number is around 2.3.
Using Alexa data is simply not a good way to compare websites. You can’t simply rely on the notion that all of them are equally wrong.
Aug 6th, 2009
malcolm
Amir – while Alexa may be unrepresentative, I’m not sure your blog is necessarily representative of its unrepresentativeness. If you see what I mean. I did do a post comparing Alexa data with official ABCe data.
Aug 6th, 2009
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