Community Marketing

A website needs a marketing strategy, just like any other venture.
And a marketing strategy needs some goals, and goals need numbers.
It’s a common problem: Assuming an adept marketing plan, just how many website visitors is a realistic expectation?

Of course, you can also ask how long a piece of string is. The audience numbers depend a lot on the target audience, especially if the segmentation occurs across geographic lines.

To get a clearer indication of reasonable expectations for South African websites, I decided to crunch some numbers. I used data available from the www.opa.org.za site, which represents the leading web publishers in the country. Most numbers are second quarter, 2008.

I only looked at Domestic Traffic, since I assume it is better to focus your marketing efforts on a market that is on your doorstep. Obviously, there are valid exceptions to this, but one has to start somewhere!

I started off with 103 websites that are monitored by OPA, and I ignored all email sites (such as Webmail, Mweb mail etc).

Here is what I found (rounded off):

Average unique browsers per site: 151,000

Average page impressions per site: 2.5 milion per month

Those numbers are quite impressive, but are skewed by the big players that get well over 20 million impressions per month. Once News24.com , Vodacom4me, MSN and Mweb sites are removed, the stats are as follows:

Average unique browsers per site: 103,000
Average page impressions per site: 1.4 million per month

And when I looked at all sites whose traffic was under 5 million page impressions per month, the stats are as follows (sample base of 89 sites):

Average unique browsers per site: 96,000
Average page impressions per site: 1 million per month

Assuming you are launching a new website, with a well thought out offering, marketing plan and budget, and are targetting a wide South African audience, these last numbers are most realistic. Bear in mind though, that the 89 sites that these stats come from are still made up of “big players” like Women24, Yellowpages.co.za and Fin24.co.za. These sites have worked hard to get to their status, and overnight success for you is not very likely. In order to compete in their game, you must be prepared to run a very tight and strategically brilliant venture.

Also, a lot of these sites have a strong offline presence, which acts as an excellent marketing channel.

Visual Representation of the 89 sites and their unique browsers (click for larger image):

Visual Representation of the 89 sites and their page impressions (click for larger image):

All numbers from AC Nielsen and www.opa.org.za

Of course, these stats are only representative of websites that are represented by the OPA (Online Publishers Association). That makes for a very selective bunch. If you have personal experience with drawing traffic to a new South African site, please add your comment below!