Disclaimer before I begin: This article is intended to provide a basic snapshot of trending data as supplied by publically available sources or supplied by the source, it is not an in depth analysis relating stats against the quality of publisher content, audience, engagement. etc. Secondly the stats are limited to the specific parent sites, and do not take into account sister sites or network sites from each of the publishers (eg: Campaign brief / BestAdsOnTV).
The back story:
This is the third time I’ve posted statistical information on specific advertising industry publishers. The last time it stirred up a few debates in the comments with the Australian Audit Bureau weighing in to argue for greater standards of measurement within the industry. There was additional discussion over the audience and whether international traffic should be counted, and the quality of reach attained by each publication.
5 sites and a look at Traffic Vs Search Vs Social
Looking a little deeper, digitally speaking:
As well as just traffic stats the team here also had a quick look at Social share of voice (SOV) and Organic Search (SEO). The results are pretty interesting.
Size – does it matter?
As the ad industry and digital matures we are moving closer to an ‘effectiveness model’ versus the older ‘reach and frequency model’ (esp’ in relation to measuring digital) so one could argue that the volume stats here are less relevant than they seem. My own opinion is that the volume information is only one part of the story but regardless of volumes the trending data is valuable and at the very least should allow each publisher to better its digital strategy in the future. One thing is for sure, each publisher has substantial year on year digital growth so well done to them all.
Enough! Let’s begin!
Part 1: Traffic:
Firstly wow, what a change since Jan 2009… between the five publishers the unduplicated monthly volume of Unique Browsers is over half a million. In the interests of being consistent I have not used The Audit Bureau’s Australian only figures – I have used gross visitor numbers supplied from each party (*B&T figures supplied by separate source).
Above: Trending Timeline (Source: Alexa)
Above: The two blog based sites Mumbrella and Inspiration Room account for a large portion of visits
(Update: Information above has been changed from original post and now shows estimated AdNews PI’s based on previously supplied data from Google Analytics.)
Above: B&T commands a larger portion of time thanks to 5 minutes average stay per visitor.
*AdNews (using third party data)
Actual Monthly Web Traffic (Source: Supplied by Publisher):
Above: Fastest growth = AdNews
Time on Site:
Adnews**
Above: Most Time spent per visit = B&T
PART 2: Search Performance
Interestingly B&T and MarketingMag (we only included them in this section) performs the strongest, with AdNews edging out Mumbrella. We tested performance against roughly 200 of the most common search terms in marketing. There’s too much data to show but here’s a couple of charts. (Source: Tableau)
Below: B&T performance ranking against Keywords:
Below: Mumbrella’s performance ranking against Keywords:
Google Page Ranking for each Homepage:
Adnews: 6/10
B&T 6/10
InspirationRoom 5/10
Mumbrella 5/10
Campaign Brief 4/10
Part 3 Social:
Report on share of voice in ‘micromedia’ (Source: Radian6)
Number of Posts (mentions) Jul12 Aug 11: (Source Radian6)
Twitter Ranked by Followers (Source: Twitter as of Aug 25 2010): 
1. Mumbrella 14397
2. B&T 5786
3. InspirationRoom 3948
4. Campaign Brief 3934
5. Adnews 2473
Conclusion: All publishers have seen substantial gains to their credit. The stats also indicate there are different user behaviour patterns (potentially different audiences as we are unable to de-dupe) for each site with varying degrees of magnetism, loyalty and stickiness although I’ll let the comments below take care of attributing the behaviour mentioned to the publisher this time round.
Amnesia Blog 
Hi Iain,
Thanks very much for posting these stats.
While it’s brilliant news to be doing so well, it reflects very poorly on the entire marketing trade press sector that it requires Amnesia to bring these numbers into the public domain.
B&T and AdNews both write about the need for audit and transparency all the time. Yet their online traffic remains unaudited – you have nobody’s word but their own that the numbers are as they say they are. Mumbrella’s and Campaign Brief’s are audited by the ABA.
It seems particularly hypocritical of AdNews not to do so when it bars unaudited titles from competing in its own magazine awards.
Instead for this exercise we have to rely on everybody showing their Google analytics – relatively easy to manipulate and including overseas traffic, which is of little use to local advertisers.
If the online publishers who we all write about behaved like that, we’d deride them. The lack of transparency hurts the credibility of the entire marketing trade press.
How can we all hope to write authoritatively about an industry when AdNews and B&T are not demonstrating best practice?
When an online audit by the ABA is straightforward and costs little more than $100 a month, there’s no excuse not to get one done if you don’t have something to hide from your advertisers.
Thanks again for bringing some light to a murky area.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
I call bullshit on the ADnews page impresssions.
30 impressions per unique? No way.
Enbarrassing you took their word for that.
Me again.
Just another thing from looking more closely at the numbers. I see that when you last performed this exercise, AdNews was claiming 145,956 page views during February.
To have gone up to 1.2m page impressions (assuming page views and page impressions are the same thing which is not entirely clear) in the space of six months would be very impressive indeed.
If it was true.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
Update: I have amended AdNews PI figures with an estimation based on previously supplied data to give a clearer picture of PI’s.
@Bonzai – I’ll take the embarrassment on that one and hope the estimated PI’s are a better reflection.
So did ADnews lie about their page impressions then?
[…] Iain McDonald, one of Australia’s most respected digital people, published a blog post about the state of traffic for all of the online marketing titles. Clearly (and reasonably) assuming that the 1.2m figure was what it appeared to be, he informed his […]
AdNews have been really co-operative and helpful each time we have posted on this subject so I’m happy that any information supplied was sent in good faith.
[…] B&T released unaudited internal analytics in August, at which point it claimed 225,000 page impressions (including local and international traffic) per month. […]
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