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According to ABC Multiplatform figures, formerly called ABCe, for April published today (26 May), Mirror.co.uk attracted 14,108,330 unique browsers last month, up from 11,418,514 in March.

The site, which includes content from the Daily Mirror newspaper, as well as mirrorfootball.co.uk and 3am.co.uk, has seen unique browsers more than double (+51%) within the past year.

Helping it outperform the market last month was a renewed focus on its social media strategy, and in particular, Facebook. The publisher embarked on a concerted effort to seed its stories via Facebook and open more of its site content to user comments.

A source told Media Week that referrals via Facebook were responsible for less than 5% of total traffic at Mirror.co.uk in the first three months of the year, but this had rocketed to around 30%, more than four million uniques, in April.

Helped by the international interest in the run-up to last month's Royal Wedding, many Mirror stories were said to have found a new life in social media.

Facebook was said to have accounted for 90% of all Mirror.co.uk's social media traffic, with Twitter, LinkedIn and other sites combining to make up the remaining 10%. 

The publisher is hopeful it will be able to not only sustain, but also build on its double-digit traffic growth in May, with follow-up stories after the Royal Wedding mixing with news generated by the end of the Premier League season, the death of Osama bin Laden, and the Champions League Final to provide another bumper month.

In April, all other newspaper websites reported drops in monthly and weekly activity, as any Royal lift was more than offset by three bank holidays.

The Guardian.co.uk opted to withdraw its average monthly figure from the official audit for the first time since records began. It continued to publish its daily average users, which had dropped 11.58% to 2,407,265 – the worst fall of the month.

However, the site remained the second-most popular UK newspaper website by daily users by some margin. Its decision to withhold its monthly traffic figure was said to form part of a new policy of only reporting the data every other month.

A spokeswoman for Guardian.co.uk publisher Guardian News & Media, said: "We have made some minor alterations to the way our web traffic is audited by ABC. We have for some time focused on reporting our daily average unique browsers measure, which the industry agrees is the most useful, robust and transparent way to monitor web traffic.

"To reflect this focus, we will continue to audit and report our daily average unique browser figures on a monthly basis, whilst reducing the frequency with which we audit monthly unique browsers on guardian.co.uk, to once every other month."

Richard Foan, group executive director at ABC, confirmed the Guardian is reporting "the industry-agreed mandatory measure of daily average Unique Browsers", and said that any other metrics provided were at the individual publisher's discretion.

Market leader Mail Online reported a 3.4% fall in monthly browsers to 63,753,237, and a 1.8% fall to average 3,596,040 per day.

Telegraph.co.uk posted a 4.3% drop in monthly users to 38,402,509, with average daily users slipping 3.16% to 1,932,618.

Independent.co.uk had a month-on-month dip of 3.2% to 12,852,508, while monthly users fell 3.8% over the same period.