Effective Measure report for South Africa August 2011

The same three websites topped the local traffic ranking.

While the SA website rankings for local and international traffic are similar, there are a few websites which are far higher on the list for local traffic than total traffic. These include Vodacom, Webmail and MWeb - all of which cater mainly for SA visitors who use the websites to retrieve email or manage their accounts online.

The table below shows South Africa's top websites ranked according to total unique visitors.

SA's 21 biggest websites according to Effective Measure

The DMMA/Effective Measure statistics provide online advertisers with audited and trustworthy statistics to assist them with media planning, but because it is a paid-for, opt-in service, not all of SA's websites are included in this list. BidorBuy, Gumtree, FNB, Absa and Standard Bank are several of the very large sites which are absent.

A service which helps to ascertain which websites SA users visit the most is Alexa. However, to rank websites, Alexa uses statistics from its community of Alexa toolbar users, where data is collected and sent to Alexa for processing. In other words, users need to have installed Alexa toolbars, and data could be skewed because these users may not be representative of the Internet population as a whole.

Therefore, Alexa only provides a rough estimate of website traffic and rank, and is neither as accurate nor as trusted as Effective Measure's statistics.

According to Alexa's SA rankings, Google.co.za is the most popular website in our country, followed by Facebook and Google.com. When it comes to SA-only sites, BidorBuy is ranked top, followed by Gumtree and News24.

The following table provides an overview of the most popular websites among SA Internet users who have the Alexa toolbar installed.

Top 20 sites in SA according to Alexa

The need to visit sites such as Alexa to see a full list of SA's largest websites is obviously not optimal, and the DMMA recently announced that it is launching SA's first online audience measurement panel. To be implementated by Effective Measure, the panel will be a recruited sample of South Africans whose web-browsing activities will be monitored and measured using software downloaded and installed on their computers.

This data, when combined with the current DMMA member information, will give advertisers a much clearer picture of the Total South African Internet Universe.

The additional statistics gathered by the DMMA/Effective Measure audience measurement panel will limit the need to visit other web traffic measurement services such as Alexa, and all the data will be available to Effective Measure users.

Effective Measure table updated to include top 21 websites instead top 10 at 12.17pm on 14 September 2011.
Alexa table updated to include top 20 websites instead top 10 at 12.58pm on 14 September 2011.