- Impact
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I discovered how to almost guarantee that visitors will look at more than one post, making the bounce rate in the single digits almost every day. Thanks to google analytics and my new weekly series idea
For those of you who don’t know, let me define what a site’s bounce rate is. It is the percentage of visitors that only look at one page and then “bounce” or leave the site right away. A high bounce rate is typically undesirable, because it means visitors see less content than the webmaster would typically desire.
I’m fascinated by statistics of all types, so naturally I obsessively look at my google analytics statistics for my blog stats. I couldn’t help but notice a significant difference in my my bounce rate during one “mysterious” week
Typically, I had a history of a fairly high bounce rate, because this was a blog, and most visitors had no need to look at more than just the post of their interest. A high bounce rate is typical for blogs. Mine was 100% for a few days too, because that was before I started updating again.
Before November 17, I had a very high bounce rate every day. It went down from November 17 to 23, but after November 23, it “mysteriously” skyrocketed again. So, why was my bounce rate so low from November 17 to November 23? I noticed that it also happened to be the week of my first weekly series. Apparently, if I have a series index post followed by seven other posts (one per day for the series), visitors tend to look at more than one post in the series. I make sure that each posts links back to the series index, and most of my visitors will not only read the post that they searched for but also take a look at the entire series index and possibly click on another post.
For you bloggers out there, this is a great way to get visitors to read more than one post! Have one index of several posts which links to all of them, and make sure each of the individual posts also links back to the series index. This way, readers will not only read the post that then first landed on but also refer to the series index and have a high rate of reading other similar posts in the same “index” post.
So, I will make sure to continue my weekly series posts. I write my content so it will be read, and I was very happy to see that most people saw more than one post that week.