How much traffic should your organization’s website receive every month? 10K unique website visitors? 100K website unique visitors? It’s a tough question to answer because there are so many variables and every organization has unique goals and challenges. Are you a small membership driven organization or an advocacy organization? Do you focus on broad issues or super niche issues? It’s also important to consider how often you produce website content and how well you promote it. Just because you write a great blog post or release an informative special report does not mean people will flock to your website to read it.
Despite the many variables that factor into figuring how much website traffic “is normal” for your organization, I’m always excited to check out the latest studies that highlight these types of benchmarks. Groundwire recently released their website report that measured 40+ small to medium sized environmental nonprofits benchmarks for common website statistics, as well as information about how much time and energy organizations are investing in their websites.
Check out the key findings:
- The median group received about 40,000 visits in the last year.
- The typical website visitor looks at about three pages per visit, and the typical web visit is two to three minutes.
- About 40% of visitors to a typical group's homepage leave a website without exploring further. Note, a bounce rate over 50% may indicate a lack of engaging, relevant website content.
- Facebook is a significant source of referral traffic for a few groups.
- Search engines refer about 55% of the visits to a typical group's website.
- About one third of the visits to a typical group's website are from repeat visitors.
- Mobile phones (such as the iPhone) account for 1% of web traffic. I found this particular stat interesting given the fact that mobile is growing tremendously and in 2010 alone mobile email went up 36% in the U.S. As more organizations begin investing in making their websites and email communications more mobile friendly, this statistic will increase.
- Organizations update their website about once a week, and spends about 8.5 person-hours per week creating and editing website content.
- Web traffic correlates to the amount of time a group invests in their site and to the number of members/supporters that a group has.
- Organizations getting above-average traffic invest usually at least one hour per week per full-time staffer or a $100K budget creating content for their website.
- 45% of have a blog and many blog regularly.
- About 6.5% of its visits come from users using IE6. I think it's safe to say that nonprofits should not invest much resources to ensure that their site works in IE6 given how outdated this browser is.
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