MyShtetl.co.za continued on its meteoric rise in traffic in 2011, with total visits to the site reflecting a staggering increase of 115 percent - from 116,000* in 2010 to 249,000 in 2011.
Some new trends have emerged from earlier growth in usage of the website, says publisher Ant Katz, who feels that the local market saturation “is clearly starting to show.” The website was launched in 2009.
Katz said that he was most encouraged by the general emerging trend which clearly indicated that regular users (Shtetlers) come to the site more often. “There is a considerable increase in the amount of time our returning visitors spend on the site over a month,” explained Katz, who says more frequency of visits – although resulting in a little less time spent per visit and slightly fewer pages viewed on each visit – is the best reflection of a website-user’s loyalty.
Illustrating this trend, says Katz, is that while the number of visits had risen by 115 percent, the number of pages viewed by visitors had increased by ‘only’ 89 percent – from 388,000 in 2010 to 732,000 in 2011.
Over the life of the website these figures now stood at 355,000 visits and 1.133-mil pages viewed.
“We are increasingly seeing that users don’t want to miss anything that appears on the website and the numbers who come on to the site daily** is soaring,” said Katz. The website had considered introducing a second weekly newsletter, he said. Their popular newsletter goes out to over 2,000 subscribers on Wednesday nights.
MyShtetl had, however, elected to rather focus on adding an active Facebook facility to which users can link for daily updates – and two twitter accounts – one to advise of new Jobs posted and another to get tweeted whenever a new story is posted. These would be added during February.
Most visited advertisers: Kosher, Kosher, Kosher...
The kosher community represent a disproportionate portion of MyShtetl’s audience. This has always been the case. An example of this is that of the thousands of ‘referred’ users from the UOS website, over 90 percent are returning visitors. Similarly, 86 percent of users who link to us from the SydShul website have been on MyShtetl before.
So it is no surprise that our kosher advertisers do (very, very) well on the website.
The most visited advertiser micro-site on MyShtetl during 2011 was Mooz Bros, which had 1,874 visits during 2011 (and has had 7,193 over the life of the website). Most of those came from Google searches.
That was even more than had used the entire “Kosher Catering” category which had 1,528 visits; the “Kosher Freshfood” category with 1,486; and the “Kosher Eateries” category with 1,315.
Then came Nandos: 1,234; Kollel Books: 745; Friends: 720; Europa: 526; and KosherWorld with 521 visits to their microsite.
Some interesting statistics and trends
Of the visits to MyShtetl during 2010, 133,415 came from South Africa, while 67,200 came from what Katz refers to as the ‘expat countries’ (US, Israel, UK, Canada, Australia) in that order.
Another 6,236 visits emanated from the other six countries with over 500 visits each in the year, (Germany, Holland, France, India, Italy and Switzerland), while 157 other countries in the world contributed 42,079 visits.
The average amount of time a visitor spent on MyShtetl in 2011 was 6 minutes 31 seconds for returning visitors and 3:35 for first-time visitors. According to Google Analytics, where most of this data comes from, these are extremely high.
The number of visits per day** averages 682, buy varies widely with Thursdays (after the Wednesday night newsletter marketing) often tops 2,000. While an average three days would see 2,046 visits, the top three-day period in December was 5,066 visits. And, while the average week in 2011 saw 4,774 visitors, the top week in December had 11,156.
Ever-more expatriot South African Jews and general overseas Jewish organisations have been finding MyShtetl. Over the life of the website, 80 percent of all visits have emanated from within SA. But that figure has steadily declined as more and more expats come on.
“We decided to analyse this situation over six-month time-chunks to see if the trend was steady or erratic,” says Katz. “The results show a distinct and clear trend-line.”
During the site’s first six-month period, SA users represented 87 percent of all visits. Over the following four periods, these numbers declined to 83 percent, 77, 73, and the latest figure stands at 66 percent.
Mobile visits are booming
The largest increase of the year was in the fast-growing field of “Mobile usage” – which includes hand-held devices such as cell phones and tablets (which all work on cell software). In 2011 there were 13,898 mobile visits averaging 3:16 minutes each. This was way up on the 2010 figures of 4,682 visits and 2:47.
Publisher Ant Katz notes that while the largest growth trends in 2011 were in foreign visits, up to 33 percent of total in the past six months (although he expects that percentage to drop in the next six months) and from mobile devices.
Of all mobile access for 2011, 47 percent was SA based. “Many of those numbered in both the overseas and mobile fields are due to SA travellers – where emerging technologies allow so much more internet access on smartphones and tablets,” says Katz.
Each country is evolving completely different habits regarding mobile usage of internet and 2011 was the first year that MyShtetl had sufficient significant data to make comparisons. Readers should note, however, that these figures will be somewhat skewed by the SA travellers abroad who would do most of their visits on mobile devices.
The most significant users of mobile turned out to be the UK, with 27.43 percent of all UK access coming from mobile devices. This is significantly higher than anywhere else. So much so that while only 4.8 percent of all visits to MyShtetl emanated from the UK, a whopping 22 percent of ALL mobile traffic to MyShtetl came from there.
Australia was second placed, accounting for 14.28 percent of our mobile traffic, the USA third at 10.11, Canada 5.47, SA 4.02 and Israel at 3.34 percent. It should be noted, however, that these figures are percentages of all mobile traffic on MyShtetl – so the highest number of actual visits came from SA and second most was from the US.
Unique visitors vs. returnees
The 133,415 visits from South Africans during 2011 came from 50,027 unique*** visitors who spent an average of 5:55 minutes on the site.
The number of unique visitors vs. total visitors, as well as the time they spend on the website, differs substantially from one country to the next (and on which stories appear).
In 2011 the USA had 23,376 visits from 16,236 unique visitors; in second place, the UK unseated Israel from its traditional spot with 16,048 and 11,770; third placed was Israel with 14,636 and 7,184; fifth was Australia with 6,792 and 4,118; and fifth was Canada at 6,348 visits from 3,192 unique visitors.
“The regular pattern of Expat users has Israel in second place,” says Katz, “and there is a day-to-day change between Australia and Canada for the fourth and fifth place positions.”
*Numbers rounded off
**Weighted – With usage of MyShtetl dropping by 90 percent on Shabbas and Chagim, we use a formula that assumes 295 non-frum days plus ten percent = 325 days in 2011.
***Google use the term “unique” to count one person only once in the reported time. A user accessing the website from two addresses, say a work computer and a cell phone would be counted twice. Similarly, two users using one computer at home would be counted once.
MyShtetl 2011 showed a phenominal growth .jpg
