Borrell Study Questions Quality of Local Site Traffic

Many visitors to locally oriented news and information Web sites are neither local nor loyal, according to a new study from Borrell Associates. On average, about 30% of the visitors don't live in the market and about 25% of the page views are by “fly-bys” who may not return for another year, if ever, said the study, which is based on surveys of site visitors conducted over the past two years and some “complicated math.” The study also found the average local Web site unique visitor count overstates the number of actual local people coming to the site by a factor of five. “So, a site that tells local advertisers it has 500,000 monthly unique visitors should probably be forthright and start saying it reaches about 100,000 local people,” according to the study’s executive summary.