Haven’t you always wanted people to come to your website, get to know you, and hang around. I am doing an experiment and wanted to show you behind the scenes some insights on how you can boost your numbers to make a greater value for your web site visitor’s experience. The goal of this tutorial will be to increase the flowthrough rate of one of my articles and give the reader more value.
THE PREPARATION
To do this you’ll need a Wordpress.org blog. Self hosted. I recommend Blue Host. I’m not an affiliate of theirs, but I wish I was. Then you can add the plug-in “Google Analytics for WordPress.” This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics to your WordPress blog, adding lots of features, eg. custom variables and automatic clickout and download tracking.
THE GOOGLE ANALYTICS VISITOR FLOW TOOL
This tool allows you to see where visitors come from and where they are going. You find this chart by going to AUDIENCE > VISITOR FLOW. I have several visitors this last month come into 2 different articles on my blog
Behind the scenes of Disciple Deep
As you can see, from the last 6 months, I had 126 (82+44) people entered my site from2 articles I wrote for my blog “Increase-Creator-Value” and “Feeling Overwhelmed Limitations” ….
Both posts are getting traffic, but everyone leaves right after they land there\ (notice that big, red drop off with no “flow through rate”. I am now going to check the bounce rates of the posts to see if they are quality posts or if my keywords are just good enough to bring people in. I find this in CONTENT > SITE CONTENT > LANDING PAGES. The bounce rate is how quickly people want to leave once they’ve come to your site.
The bounce rate for Increase Creator Value is 76%. Not good, But it’s better than the Feeling Overwhelmed Limitations whose bounce rate is 100%. You will have some bounce rate. What this tells me is that the content for the Feeling Overwhelmed Limitations is not good at all for what people are looking for with that search term. I will have to revamp the content by catering it to a broader market or rethinking my approach on the subject.
Let’s focus on Increase Creator Value because that has a little bit of sticking power. Since the goal of this tutorial is to give the reader more value, we want them to stick around a bit before they leave me forever. The average time on site is 13 seconds, which means I will need to do some work in the intro of that article to keep people around…. These article are imperative that I improve because I already have the traffic. 98% of new visitors are finding me this way. That is what I will work on next.
DEDUCTION
What I can deduce from this experiment is that if you have no FLOW-THROUGH TRAFFIC, your content stinks. In this case, my content stinks. I’m not connecting with the person that typed in those keywords into Google. The good news is I have hit upon some good keywords that people are searching for. So not all is lost.
NEXT
Do I have any articles that people like? Let’s see.
AHA. Expert Marketers Sell and Comic Book Creator are both good. Whew! I get 47% new traffic here from Expert Marketers Sell and 87% new traffic from Comic Book Creator. But I know they are good articles people want to read because they are spending the whole minute it takes to read the article.
Disciple Deep Landing Pages
By checking out the drop off rate on these articles I’m going back to the Visitor Overflow area and looking at the group dynamics for more articles. The drop off rate (bounce rate) is still high 73.7% and 81.3 % respectively.
The bounce rates for landing pages with better articles
Since the bounce rate is still pretty high, what I am going to do is put a link at the bottom of the page linking these articles together telling them to go here next. When I fix this problem I should not have them leaving these pages. I want them to read at least 2 articles while they are here.
TARGETS
I have 2 objectives to work on for this month.
1. Write 2 better articles for the ones where my traffic is coming from.
2. Put a link connecting my two most popular articles together in a string that will retain readership.
My goals are to lower the bounce rates on all 4 of these pages. I’ll check that in a month and see what has happened.