Quartz grows traffic through social media

Lauren Indvik of Mashable writes about how two-month-old business news site Quartz is growing its audience.

Indvik writes, “It’s none too surprising, then, that the makeup of Quartz‘s referral traffic is markedly different from the business publications it seeks to compete against: Approximately 40% of traffic comes from social networks, 35% from other websites and 11% from search, Editor in Chief Kevin Delaney tells me. The remaining 14% is attributed to direct traffic and Quartz‘s email newsletter. Its mobile audience is significant: Two in every 10 visitors accesses the site from a smartphone, and one in every 10 arrives via tablet.

“The percentage of social media referrals is particularly high. The Economist, by comparison, owes just 15% of incoming traffic to social media, a spokesperson for the magazine tells me. Within social, Delaney says Twitter is Quartz‘s number one referrer, followed by Digg, Facebook, Google and LinkedIn — an unusual assortment for a business publication.

“Approximately 60% off traffic is domestic. Following the U.S., Canada, the UK, France, Australia and Germany rank highest in readership — ‘which is great, because we haven’t done a lot of marketing internationally,’ Delaney observes.”

Read more here.