NZ Web’s Overseas Invasion

During June, almost 1 in 3 visitors to the top 20 New Zealand sites came from outside New Zealand.

 

Our analysis of the figures from Nielsen NetRatings showed that news media websites in particular attracted the highest percentage of non New Zealand traffic

 

Stuff.co.nz (45% local), NZHerald.co.nz (49% local) and TVNZ.co.nz (63% local) were only surpassed by New Zealand.com for international visitors to a local site. 93% of visits to NewZealand.com were from international visitors.

 

Nielsen NetRatings allows agencies to look at traffic to more than 340 New Zealand websites and compare their total traffic to their domestic traffic only.  By taking the latter from the former we can calculate the non domestic visitor numbers.

 

The high international numbers are not a surprise to the news organisations themselves.  In this months Metro magazine Jeremy Rees, editor of the NZ Herald online, explains that roughly half of their overseas traffic comes from general Google traffic and the remainder from New Zealanders living overseas specifically looking for news from home.

 

Implications for Advertisers

High overseas numbers are not necessariy a bad thing for advertisers.  We have a number of clients who wish to target overseas eyeballs on local sites.  We have found this to be very effective.

 

However if you are a client who purchases a run of site campaign you should be aware of the potential number of page impressions that will appear overseas.

 

If your campaign is strictly local you can opt to target local browsers only though you will probably have to pay a loading for this. 

 

Other facts revealed by the analysis are:

 

The top 6% of websites in New Zealand generate 62% of the site visits.

 

The top 20 Sites (by total unique browser numbers) are detailed in the following chart:

 

The major site missing from this analysis is Google.co.nz which is not in the Nielsen Market Intelligence Survey.

 

Source

John Buckley, 360interactive

Using data from Nielsen NetRatings, 1^st of June to 30^th June

 

Technical notes: While commonly referred to as visitor numbers, the Unique Browser measurement from Nielsen Netratings has a more technical definition (as follows):

Unique Browsers (UB): Each user visiting a site instrumented with the Nielsen Online code has a unique cookie id assigned to their browser to help determine browser uniqueness. This metric displays the number of Unique Browsers which visited a site owned by the publisher within the selected reporting period. The Unique Browser is scaled; scaling this figure is to account for users who have cookies disabled.