March 22, 2013
British publisher Guardian News and Media’s mobile traffic reached an all-time high in February, due largely to the launch of a responsive site late last year.
The numbers come from the Audit Bureau of Circulations’ February online certification. The Guardian has plenty of mobile tools, including Web and applications for iPhone, Android, Kindle Fire and BlackBerry devices.
“One thing that has proven to be especially fascinating is the truth that 1/2 our mobile users are connected to Wi-Fi, which proves that there’s just as strong a case for at the couch as there’s for at the move,” said Tanya Cordrey, chief digital officer on the Guardian, London.
“A larger proportion of users access our main news and sport sections on mobile,” she said. “This is because they generally tend to exploit their mobiles to access breaking headlines or news, whilst they use our desktop site for more exploratory browsing.”
Mobile growth
The ABC audit was conducted from Feb. 1 – 28 and appears at traffic around the Guardian’s iPhone application, mobile site and PC site.
According to ABC’s findings, the Guardian’s mobile site brought in 17.2 million monthly unique visitors in February. It is a 44.7 percent year-over-year and seven.9 percent month-over-month increase.
The daily mobile unique visitors totaled greater than 990,000.
Previously, the top variety of monthly mobile unique visitors that the Guardian had was 17 million in April 2012.
ABC also checked out traffic to the Guardian’s iPhone apps in February and split the numbers into two groups of tourists by Britain and america.
Numbers from the Guardian’s Android, BlackBerry and iPad apps aren’t included inside the findings.
The Guardian racked up 167,000 unique monthly iPhone app visitors in Britain for the month of February. Within the U.S., unique monthly visitors to the Guardian’s iPhone app totaled greater than 36,000.
“At the Guardian we all know that people who use our apps are yet another user base entirely,” Ms. Cordrey said.
“They are loyal Guardian readers and their patterns of usage reflect this difference, with a miles higher proportion of page views per visit,” she said. “On the internet we now have many more users coming from Google and social sites, who’re less prone to browse the location for long periods.”
The Guardian also saw traffic to its Website spike in February.
The Guardian brought in additional than 4.5 million average daily unique visitors in February, per ABC’s audit. The traffic represents a 28 percent year-over-year and six percent month-over-month increase.
February marked the second one-highest month of monthly unique Web visitors for the Guardian with 77.4 million monthly unique visitors. The very best choice of monthly unique visitors totaled 77.9 million in January.
Read on mobile
The Guardian was build up its mobile presence during the last couple of years.
In November, the publisher rolled out a responsive Internet site. With mobile Web representing 18 percent of traffic on the time, the goal of the recent design was to create a continuing reading experience across all screens (see story).
Additionally, in October 2011 the Guardian launched an iPad app that mimicked the design of a newspaper (see story).
“The proportion of people accessing our content and journalism via mobile will keep growing, as will tablet usage and everything in between,” Ms. Cordrey said.
“Our priority as a digital-first news organization is making sure that now we have an identical quality content across any device – desktop or mobile – to permit our users to access it from anywhere they please,” she said.
Final Take
Lauren Johnson is associate reporter on Mobile Marketer, New York
/>