Where do your visitors roam?
by Randall McCarley
October 19th, 2006
Doing a little research into my logs and I see:
- Press: 3%
- Home Page: 8%
- Interviews: 9%
- Core Pages: 10%
- Blog: 20%
- Articles: 52%
Now the core pages are About, Contact, Services, etc. and where I want people interested in my services to go. The Home Page is its own entity. I don’t expect many people to be interested in my Press section mostly because it is old news (it serves as a portfolio of sorts). The Interviews, Blog and Articles are all free content I put up to get attention and boy does it work!
Here is where things get interesting - look at the entry pages by percentage:
- Press: 1%
- Core: 2%
- Interviews: 9%
- Home Page: 21%
- Articles: 34%
- Blog: 34%
The blog draws as many visits as the 20+ articles and it is just a couple months old! Also note that even though the Core Pages bring in 2% of the overall visits 10% of the visitors check those pages out. That’s a good sign!
Now the exit pages:
- Press: 2%
- Core: 5%
- Interviews: 12%
- Home Page: 16%
- Articles: 17%
- Blog: 48%
Clearly the blog is doing a great job drawing traffic but a horible job moving that traffic to the conversion (Core) pages. The overall trend for entry and exit pages is similar.
By looking deeper I can see which pages are turning people away and do something about it. I can alse see which pages are the most popular (the blog gets almost 3 times the views as the home page and has nearly double the entry visits!).
My stats program keeps track of some other important figures like the average viewer spends about 5 minutes on the site and 30%+ of the site viewers bookmark a page. 30% is really high and I like to think it’s a testament to the quality of the content provided.
Next Article: Ready to 2.0? Previous Article: Designing for not-as-abled users