7 Ways To Make Your Web Site Stickier Than Syrup!
Posted on 26. Nov, 2009 by Lyz in analytics
7 top tips for increasing user engagement on your web site
A good indication of how interesting and useful your web site is to your users is to measure the amount of time they spend on your site, how many pages they look at and the bounce rate.
The first two metrics are fairly self-explanatory but what’s bounce rate I hear you say – here’s the short definition from Avinash Kaushik (Google Analytics evangelist):
The bounce rate reveals the number of visitors who stayed just a few seconds … people who came to your site but didn’t engage.
If your bounce rate is high then your visitors are not engaging with your site and that’s not good news – you’re not going to sell anything to people who don’t stay around long enough to find out what you’re about. The average bounce rate will differ from industry to industry but 40% is considered pretty good but anywhere over 60% and you need to take action.
So now you know how to measure ’stickiness’ let’s look at what you can actually do to turn your web site into a veritable honeypot that attracts visitors and keeps them interested enough to stay.
Click2Customer achieves 0% bounce rate!
Over the last month I’ve managed to achieve a 0% bounce rate on this website – I’m really proud of that and now I’ll share with you the top 7 things I did to achieve it:
- Write a blog with useful and engaging content – articles containing tips and how to’s are usually the most popular posts and help to position you as an expert in your field – this in turn makes visitors more likely to buy your products/services. These are the types of articles that users like to spread and recommend which brings me to number two…
- Allow users to share your content quickly and easily – the most popular method seems to be retweeting, if you’re a wordpress user use the TweetMeme plug in and to encourage bookmarking and emailing of articles use the Add to Any plug in
Social sharing elements on click2customer's blog posts
- Put related article links at the bottom of your blog posts – contextual ones work best and if you’re using wordpress you can use the Contextual Related Posts plug in to do this
- Add a poll to the sidebar of your pages - I found that using quick no-brainer questions has worked best. This actually has more value to you than you might think; you not only collect useful insights about your site visitors but you can then write about the results of your poll/survey at a later date
- Add a blog feed to your home page – this will pull the latest articles headlines from your blog into your home page. This again has multiple benefits; you get fresh content on your home page which helps with your search rankings and there’s something to catch the eye of your visitors. People on home pages are scanning content to find a link to the piece of information they’re looking for so having stand out titles for your articles is also paramount – some of mine I’ll admit are not so eye-popping but I’m working on it!
Sticky elements on click2customer's home page
- Let users download something for free - and by free I mean not even asking them for their email address. I wrote a web site mot checklist that my visitors can get as a PDF just by clicking a link that appears on the home page and also in the sidebar of my blog
- Have a video or click to rotate feature on your home page – I haven’t gone a far as a video as I’m camera shy but that’s something else I’m working on! I have however got two arrows on the main part of my home page that flip to another page of my blog without refreshing the page – it’s clever and it seems that curiosity really does get the better of us!
Well that wraps up my 7 top tips for creating an engaging web site that keeps your site visitors clicking away and your bounce rate low. I’m sure there are many more so if you’ve got any to add please leave a comment.
5 Responses to “7 Ways To Make Your Web Site Stickier Than Syrup!”
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Thanks for sharing the piece about the bounce rate. And you not only shared information about it but also shared solutions on how to achieve low bounce rate. Keep up the good work.
The information presented is top notch. I’ve been doing some research on the topic and this post answered several questions.Check out my website if you get a chance, just click on name. (I don’t want to leave a link, it looks too spammy)
The information presented is top notch. I’ve been doing some research on the topic and this post answered several questions.
Thanks for this post. Your blog is really good, I hope to read more on this from you.
I just wanna say thank you for the great information its really a big help to me..Hope that this is not the last thing you’re posting I’m looking forward for the other tips you gonna post.Keep it up!