International vs Local Visits on SA's Websites
How many South African users are visiting local sites? Would it surprise you to know that almost half of the total traffic on domestic sites is actually from international visitors? (* see reference below graph)
47% of total traffic does not come from South Africans, suggesting that our websites are globally being consumed. This could be from South Africans abroad or even general interest.
If you compare the local versus total traffic for the top 10 websites the first observation that comes to mind is the difference in ranking on some of the websites. A websites such as Adgator, receives only 23% local visits, and is ranked 28th locally. On the global front, Adgator is ranked 8th, suggesting international interest.
The Times readers are 52% global, whilst Mweb consists out of 10% global users.
Domestic page impressions, on the other hand, are about 84% of total impressions, suggesting that local traffic tends to browse more pages on each website.
But are these stats making sense? If you consider the amount of people that have access to the internet outside of South Africa in relation to South African users it is in actual fact logical that a lot more traffic is coming from International visitors. It will be interesting to see how these numbers change when the prediction of easier access and hopefully cheaper and faster broadband towards the end of the year kicks in.
| * | Comparing total and domestic website traffic from the January Nielsens/Netratings data on South African OPA sites. |
