For many, Tuesday 4th January represented a return to work after the festive break. New daily data from Ipsos iris provides fascinating insights into website and app performance on specific dates. Following on from our Christmas and Boxing Day analysis, UKOM identifies some of the ‘back to work’ winners, by comparing audience data for the top 100 websites and apps on January 4th with that of the same day the week before.
Whilst Boxing Day was all about retailers, on Tuesday 4th the big focus was on Finance. The top 10 banking apps all featured in the top 100 apps on January 4th and all 10 of them had higher audiences than both the day before (D) and the previous Tuesday (W). For all but one of them, app audiences were more than 20% higher than the week before as bank accounts revealed the truth about people’s Christmas spending and how much they had left before the long-awaited January pay-check arrived.
Elsewhere in finance, after missing out on the Christmas Day lottery jackpot, hopefuls with Premium Bonds headed to the NS&I website – its audience was 294% higher on 4th January than the week before as nearly half a million visitors dreamed of being one of the two £1 million winners being revealed. MoneySavingExpert.com’s audience was also up by 132% compared to the Tuesday before - likely to be in part due to the weekly ‘MSE Money Tips’ email which subscribers received that day.
Finance was not the only thing on people’s minds as they returned to work. New Year resolutions to get in shape, improve work-life balance or earn more money resulted in growth of fitness and job hunting services online. Fitbit’s app had over 2.5 million users on Jan 4th, up by 15% compared to the previous Tuesday whilst My Fitness Pal’s audience rose by 61% to over 1.1 million. In terms of career services, visitors to Linkedin increased (website +43% & app +6%) whilst 51% more people visited Indeed.co.uk on Tuesday January 4th compared to 28th December.
After dramatic dips on both Christmas Day and New Year’s Day, Gov.uk (+40%) and nhs.uk (+26%) both saw their audiences return to over 5.5 million daily visitors. Almost 3 million people also accessed the NHS Covid19 app on January 4th - an increase of 28%. Boris Johnson’s press conference that day announcing (to many relieved parents) that the country was not going to shut down and that people need to get the booster most likely contributed to the uplifts.
Given the return to work by many, obvious rises on January 4th came from services typically associated with business productivity including outlook.com (+23%), office.com (+79%) and sharepoint.com (+128%) and apps such as Microsoft Teams (+137%), Google Docs (+82%), Google Drive (+57%).
Mobile phone networks were another group of websites that attracted a lot more users than the same day the week before – Vodafone (+24%), 02 (+36%) and EE (+72%) were all in the top 100 websites on January 4th and all witnessed double digit growth.
Several delivery and package tracking services saw a marked increase in audiences on January 4th compared to the week before – maybe people were sending back unwanted gifts or tracking those which hadn’t been delivered before Christmas? RoyalMail.com (+82%) and Hermesworld.com (+64%) both featured in the top 100 websites after huge growth and the relatively new Shop: Package and Order tracker app entered the top 100 app list after having an audience 255% higher than the week before with more than nearly 650K people visiting in a single day.
Finally, the decision to award Tony Blair a Knighthood in the New Year’s Honours list contributed to uplifts experienced by the Change.org website over the first few days of January as a petition against the award was being hosted. On January 4th alone, 627K people visited the website, an increase of 127% but according to iris data that wasn’t the highest day last week– on 6th January just over 1 million people visited Change.org, a similar number to those who had signed the petition at the time of writing.
The data here represents only a snapshot of audience data on a single day in January based on visitors aged 15+ to those sites which feature in the top 100 websites and apps on that day. Ipsos iris also provides monthly aggregated data which can be split by day, week or specific dates and which can be analysed by over 400 target audiences.
Notes on data:
Source: Ipsos MORI, Ipsos iris Online Audience Measurement Service, Daily Data, December and January 2022. All data is based on the top 100 daily websites and the top 100 daily mobile apps as ranked by audience on 4th January 2022.
Base = all aged 15+ years using PC/laptop, smartphone or tablet device(s).
