People who choose to directly visit a news site -- rather than follow a link from social media or a search engine -- tend to stick around longest and come back more often, according to a new Pew report. But since news publishers cannot control how people get to their sites, it still makes sense to offer value and engagement opportunities for casual as well as regular visitors.

In Pathways to Digital News, the Pew Research Center analyzed U.S. internet traffic to 26 top news websites. While the business model and goals of national daily news sites often are quite different from efforts to inform and engage local communities, these findings probably are still relevant if you're seeking ways to deepen online engagement with your community.

Pew found that social media and search traffic yield lower engagement. "Direct visitors -- those who type in the news outlet's specific address (URL) or have the address bookmarked -- spend much more time on that news site, view many more pages of content and come back far more often than visitors who arrive from a search engine or a Facebook referral. The data also suggest that turning social media or search eyeballs into equally dedicated readers is no easy task."

According to Pew, on average, direct visitors to top news sites stay about four and a half minutes per visit and return nearly 11 times per month, browsing about 25 pages total. In contrast, visitors arriving via Facebook stay just 1 minute 41 seconds per visit and return only three times per month, browsing about four pages total. Statistics for search traffic are barely higher than those for Facebook traffic.

For ad-supported sites, or sites where repeat visits is a key success metrics, this is important information. However, Pew found that direct visits represent only 20% of total visitors to more than half (15) of the 26 sites studied.

This reflects how difficult it is to make any site -- even a long-established, well-known national news brand such as ABC News, NPR or CNN -- compelling enough so people will opt to type in or bookmark their URL. That simply isn't how most people access news these days -- especially not for newer, smaller venues. Indeed, a key theme in another new report out this week from the American Press Institute, The Personal News Cycle, is that news audiences are generally far more agnostic about the device or pathways they take to news venues than most news organizations previously assumed -- although they do tend to trust established news brands more, especially for local news.

What constitutes valuable engagement differs significantly between national news brands and community-focused independent news/information projects. The business model of major established news outlets (which are primarily ad-supported) is certainly best served by longer visits with more repeat traffic and pages views. But at the community level, the metric that probably matters more is how people use local news and information -- including decisions they make based on the news/info content, and how they engage with the site/project and with their community. This is far more complex to measure, but it indicates that focusing only on traffic metrics probably will not gauge how well your project is serving your community.

If you seek to increase average time spent on your site, it makes sense to try to increase direct traffic. The best way to choose a domain name for your project that is very easy to remember and spell, and to invest significantly in branding and local advertising. Media and organizational partners can also be valuable on this front.

Also, the Pew report (which relied on data supplied by comScore) does not address mobile traffic to news websites; only data from desktop or laptop web browsers was counted. However, according to API's audience research, each week over half of adult U.S. news consumers currently access news via a mobile browser or app on their cell phone; and nearly a third do so on a tablet.

Pew quoted Patrick Cooper, NPR's Director of Web and Engagement, about the Digital Pathways findings: "The big thing publishers should take away from the desktop data, even if desktop is going away, is that: 1) method of entry matters to the experience and 2) they can't control method of entry," he said.