So what is External traffic? In a nutshell, Chartbeat characterizes as External any website visitor who arrives on a specific webpage without a clear referral source. They did not come from social or search, nor did they head directly to the home page or bounce over from another webpage on the site. Instead, out of the blue, they landed on a specific web page.
This behavior has only three sources, according to Cynthia Vu, a data scientist at Chartbeat. These visitors come from news aggregators like Newsbreak or Smartnews, peer-to-peer sharing (like an article your friend texted you), or push alerts.
In the chart below, you can see that the number of referrals from news aggregators is quite low and consistently so. Instead, the real uptick comes almost exclusively from what Chartbeat calls “Deep Links,” which consist of peer-to-peer sharing and push notifications.
I should note that while the above chart measures a percentage of traffic, the below chart measures total volume of pageviews. So it is not the case that traffic from push notifications and peer-to-peer sharing has only risen as a percentage of overall traffic due to declines in other areas, like Search; instead, it has risen as a source of audience visitation in real numbers.
This struck me as a notable finding, and the team at Chartbeat were shocked by the novelty of the data as well.
On a purely anecdotal level, the figures made some sense. As any of my friends, family, or sources can attest, I am an inveterate sharer of news articles. One might even say it is my love language.
I have also, in the last year and a half, begun engaging with push notifications with far more frequency. Much of this interaction comes from The Athletic, which now knows my favorite teams and sends me relevant updates on them several times a day. But I have also begun receiving and opening more push notifications related to breaking news, as well as longer lifestyle reads, from a variety of publishers.
Still, my personal consumption habits are far from indicative of the norm, and I was skeptical that my habits were being mirrored by the broader public.
