Pew: direct visitors to news sites are more engaged

• Direct visitors view five times as many pages than readers from Facebook or search engines
• Facebook and search engines aren%27t ideal tools for converting occasional visitors into permanent readers
• More mobile news readers prefer phone browser than news apps

Chalk one up for loyal customers.

News organizations invest heavily to court web readers from Facebook and Google search results, but such referred traffic may be fleeting, according to a report released Wednesday by Pew Research Center. Direct visitors who bother to type web addresses or have bookmarked their favorite news sites are the most engaged readers, it says.

Direct visitors generally spend more time on news sites than those stumble onto a story through a search engine or Facebook, the report says. Direct visitors spend about 4 minutes and 36 seconds per visit vs. about 100 seconds for those coming from search engines or Facebook.

They're also reading more pages -- 24.8 per month vs. 4.2 for Facebook users and 4.9 for search engine readers.

Using three months of data from analytics firm Comscore, Pew researchers analyzed 26 of the most popular news websites and their three main sources of web traffic -- social media referrals, search engine results and direct visits.

Direct visitors account for at least 20% of the total visitors to more than half (15) of the 26 sites, it says. In comparison, eleven sites had search engine referrals accounting for at least 20% of their traffic. Facebook accounted for 20% or more of the traffic to four sites.

Several news organizations, including Buzzfeed and NPR.org, excel at driving traffic from Facebook. But the Facebook visitors to those sites didn't stick around for long. Facebook visitors were on Buzzfeed.com for less than half the time direct visitors spent.

About 30% of CBSnews.com's traffic comes from search engine results, but the referred visitors viewed about one-quarter as many pages as direct visitors.

"It's important (for content providers) to understand the different parts of the digital realm in terms of how content and audiences function and how they interact with each other," says Amy Mitchell, Pew's director of journalism research. "One digital strategy may not cut it."

Don't bet on referrals from social media channels or search engines converting to long-term readers, the study says. The percentage of direct visitors who also came to the site via Facebook or search engine ranged only from 0.9% to 4.1%.

The study also found that mobile readers prefer visiting news sites through the phone browser than apps, affirming a trend specified in a previous Pew report. In a fall 2012 report, it said 61% of mobile users read news "mostly" from the phone browser vs. 28% "mostly" using news apps.