Affino Intelligence Briefing - June 2021 Tougher to Engage Audiences

If there is a theme for 2021, it is that traffic and engagement is diverging significantly from where it was last year. The close second is that it is harder to engage the audience than during the early days of the pandemic when there was a 200% to 300% traffic surge on many brands seeking news and insight.

 

It was to be expected, and it is consistent with what most media brands are reporting in the wider market, and is consistently highlighted throughout all the stats we are seeing.

 

Changes in the Statistical Gathering

The statistics will have been affected in Q1 and Q2 by a host of new methods we have introduced to Affino to further improve our human vs bot / hacker detection and Affino now excludes an even more significant proportion of the overall traffic from our web and email statistics.

 

We are not anticipating as many such significant technical updates in the second half of the year, so the series will be more consistent as well as more accurate in the coming months.

 

We invest heavily in providing the most accurate stats in Affino, so whilst these developments can impact on site traffic figures, they should show a relative improvement in conversion and engagement rates.

 

Views

The trend is very different from last year where there was a steady increase in traffic until the summer, this year it peaked in February and then declined steadily unitl it rose in June.

 

Traffic levels are at the same level in June 2021 as in April 2020

 

Aggregate traffic is down significantly compared to June last year. Some of this is undoubtedly down to event calendars being reorganised, with many events being pushed to the second half of the year when there is a hope that we can have more in-person events.

 

Given the recent deveopments with the Delta Covid variant, there is a chance though that these events will be disrupted in some form, and in particular that mask and number mandates will remain in place, making such events both less well attended and less profitable.

 

Some of the decine is undoubtedly down to many sectors focusing on reopening physical venues, so are not so much cyclical, but rather an effect of the focus shifting to the physical space, at least temporarily.