Pew is out with a new study that suggests how someone gets to your organization’s website says a lot about the “engagement” and “loyalty” the user has towards your site and content. Social, Search and Direct: Pathways to Digital News:
(U)sers coming to these news sites through a desktop or laptop computer, direct visitors spend, on average, 4 minutes and 36 seconds per visit. That is roughly three times as long as those who wind up on a news media website through a search engine (1 minute 42 seconds) or from Facebook (1 minute 41 seconds). Direct visitors also view roughly five times as many pages per month (24.8 on average) as those coming via Facebook referrals (4.2 pages) or through search engines (4.9 pages). And they visit a site three times as often (10.9) as Facebook and search visitors.
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The data also suggest that converting social media or search eyeballs to dedicated readers is difficult to do.
Do you find this dovetails with your own habits? What does an insight like this mean for your site and how you market it?
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