Website Metrics – Increase Your Visit Length
- 8 Comments... Click to Contribute
Web business owners enjoy some of the best tools for assessing the success of their website. In the history of business there has never been a more analysable tool than the website. Webmasters often get caught up with their website statistics, carefully monitoring daily changes (even hourly or by the minute changes for the sick puppies!). Much of the attention focuses on the number of unique visitors and page views, which are important statistics since they tell you how many humans (or supposed humans) visit your site. Webmasters focus a lot of energy on those numbers that they may forget some of the other important metrics. One of the most important and often forgotten statistics is visit length.
Average visit length doesn’t refer to how tall a person visiting your site is (but wouldn’t it be cool if browsers did capture that sort of info – the clothing stores would have a field day!), it in fact refers to how long people stay when they come visiting your website. Sadly most webmasters find that their visitors usually hang around for about 30 seconds and then click away to another domain. One of your primary goals should be to increase that average so that visitors hang around long enough to be convinced to do whatever you want them to do (join a list, click an add, make a purchase, subscribe to a membership, fill out a form etc.).
If you can convince a visitor in 30 seconds to join your newsletter you are doing well if that’s the primary goal of your site, but in general it’s the nature of online marketing that you have to slowly over time convince your suspect to become a prospect, let alone a customer (suspect being a new visitor to your site, prospect being a visitor that has expressed some interest by either joining a list or taking some action capturing some information about them, and of course a customer being someone that has made a purchase). If your site makes money purely from advertising dollars then of course the longer they stay the more ads they will be exposed to.
Recently I was checking the statistics of my friend Darren Rowse’s digital camera blog. Down the bottom of his site he uses a sitemeter of his webstatistics (incidentally these statistics are provided by a SiteMeter.com and you can get the same statistics on your site for free too). Darren’s camera blog is one of his biggest earners (Darren makes a six figure income from blogging) and by reading his statistics you can see why. Besides the great unique visitor numbers averaging over 12,000 per day he has a fantastic visitor length – average of 1 hour and 6 minutes (or it could be 1 Minute and 6 seconds, but it doesn’t really matter, my point will still be made). In the Camera Blog’s case the longer a visitor stays, the more pages he/she views the higher the likelihood that an AdSense advertisement will be clicked helping to contribute to Darren’s $15000+ USD per month AdSense cheques.
How to Increase Visit Length
1. Quality Content
I might sound like a broken record repeating the same instructions over and over but the best way to increase visit length is to have quality content on your site. The more interested in your articles the visitor is the more time he/she will spend reading them. I will assume you are already working towards the goal of adding quality content to your site so I’ll move on to other ways to increase visit length.
2. Multiple Page Articles
If you have long articles break them down into multiple pages. This will increase your pageviews and also helps those with slow net access. You probably already see a lot of bloggers using this method by listing only the first few paragraphs of a post on the front page with a more… or continue reading link. This tip works for not just blogs though so if ever your articles start breaking the 1000 word mark considering breaking them down into multiple pages.
3. Interactivity
You can increase visit length by offering some form of interactivity that prompts your visitor to actively engage with your site. One of the best examples of this are games, but of course if your site isn’t focused on gaming then games might be really out of place. As another example, if you manage a finance blog you might consider offering a collection of calculators and planners that your users can utlise to plan their finances. Obviously you need to find something that matches the interests of your audience.
4. Community
Forums, chatrooms, bulletin boards and any form of membership service helps to keep visitors glued to your site. All these services take time to build up the appropriate critical mass of users. However once your community tools take off the value they provide is hard to beat. People enjoy interacting with other people and if they are doing it on your site then you have more time to show them advertisements or convince them to join a list etc. If you want some tips on forum building try this article – How to Build a Super-Popular Forum Community in 5 Easy Steps.
5. Resources
A database driven resource can add sticky power to your site keeping visitors busy mining your data or reading through your resources. A friend of mine recently created 5000+ new entries into his blog by using a bot to gather recipe mixes for cocktails from the web. This served to create a resource – a database of drink mixes – and heck of a lot of new pages for his site that will also be great for his SEO.
Some resources can be captured from existing data online as my friend did and others may take time to build up because the ingredients are unique and require manual collection. Dane Carlson from the Business Opportunities Weblog has had great success with his franchise listings. Over the years he has slowly grown a huge blog full of franchise business opportunities that bring in a lot of traffic. He had picks every new franchise listing to keep quality standards high. Now after many years of steady labour his site brings in a lot of traffic from search engines and keeps budding entrepreneurs at his site mining his content.
Presenting Your Value
The key here is to create visitor value. Value leads to an increase in visit length. Other variables such as web design (how you present your value) will greatly impact how successful your site is. Poor design will impact the ability of your visitors to locate the value you offer. A well thought out business site offers a clear path to your visitor value making it easy for your audience to enjoy your content. Sometimes simple web design changes can be enough to increase your site’s visit length and overall website effectiveness. As with everything in online business, test your changes to make sure you can empirically validate your assumptions.
Yaro Starak
Web Entrepreneur
Subscribe to Entrepreneurs-Journey.com
Free with subscription
"How To Start An Internet Business
& Make Your First $1000 Onine"
Forward to Friend
Email a copy of this article to a friend
Loading ...
Great advice Yaro (again!). I’m thinking about going down the road of creating a camping website with advice etc. on camping. Hopefully I could create a few interesting articles, but I’m not sure whether a blog would be appropriate?? I don’t know – I know that blogs are becoming increasingly stickier, so I’d like to have a blog included, but I just worry that I may run out of things to say, perhaps? May I also thank you Yaro, as you have taught me LOADS in the past few days, and I will continue to use your website and click any adverts that interest me! Who knows, it could be down to you that I don’t ever have to start a 9-5 job!
Nice points Yaro. I think many people do miss the “real” stats by only looking at the unique numbers. Time spent and number of pages visited are no doubt more important … I’d rather have 100 unqiue visitors spending 5-10 minutes on my site and visiting 3-5 pages (with the higher possibility that they’ll subscribe either to the newsletter or rss feed) rather than 500 visitors staying under 30 seconds.
And these days, with so many sites/blogs doing the rounds, it’s getting harder and harder getting stickier. #5 Resources, is one I tend to go for and believe work best for most – more so if they have a tight niche.
BTW, did you know that your site was down for a good part of today.
There is a server upgrade going on at my host which probably accounts for the downtime. It was only meant to last maybe 30 minutes max though…
This is something I have been focusing on since the launch of my blog. I have been getting a pretty consistant 20-40 unique hits per day…but the average time a person is spending on my site is increasing, which is awesome. In august I think I was at 12% for 30min-1hour and this month currently it is 18% — I much rather focuse on those stats than the hits and such. Good article Yaro!
I operate a company, Video Openhouse (http://www.vopenhouse.ca), that produces video tours and provides professional photography for the real estate industry in Vancouver, BC. We stress to all our clients the importance of providing compelling, high-quality content on realtor websites. If you want to drive traffic to a website and increase visit length, have video content on your website. Currently, the Internet audience is enamoured with video. This is an opportunity to capitalize on the demand for video content on the Internet.
Thanks Yaro for your articles. I enjoyed looking through your website. I will be back!
Just a note to encourage Benjamin to make a beginning. Camping equipment, techniques and locations change frequently. There are several different ’styles’ of camping to consider, too.
But even these don’t begin to hint at something even more significant … your audience is ever-changing! New people are constantly coming to recreational camping and they are looking for guidance. So I really doubt if you will ever exhaust the topic and, even if you did, that would only mean that you were the final authority on much of it and all the new-comers the world over would be looking to you for guidance!
Frankly, if you do it well, I think you’ve hit on an excellent topic idea!
Excellent Tips to get high and high traffic values.
But article submissions, i don’t thinks so good way, why exchange our own unique content to other article website.
Regard,
James.
Bravo Yaro… excellent information presented in a fun-to-read style. There’s an old saying in advertising that goes, “The more you tell, the more you sell.”
This speaks to copy length, of course. Fact is, well-written LONG copy sells better than well-written SHORT copy. Like you said in your blog entry… when you get them involved, they’re more likely to buy.
Keep up the great work!
Success!
Drew Eric Whitman
Author of: CA$HVERTISING: How to Use More Than 100 Secrets of
Ad-Agency Psychology to Make BIG MONEY Selling Anything to Anyone