The difficulties of reader retention
It is relatively easy to drive bursts of traffic to a website, but perhaps the most frustrating thing for website owners is to see a huge spike, only for the numbers to return to what they were before within only a day or two. Though there are a number of tools to measure traffic and its sources, it can be incredibly difficult to gauge how “sticky” your site is.
Nieman’s Journalism Lab has a piece up today on some of the science and tools that could be factored into measuring reader engagement:
Even on the infinitely measurable web, gauging engagement remains a tricky and largely elusive task. One popular measure is the bounce rate, or percentage of visitors who leave after seeing one page. The Huffington Post, despite its surging popularity, has said the site’s bounce rate is too high, which hurts the value of its advertising. Another metric is return readership. Talking Points Memo boasts that 60 percent of readers, in a TPM survey, said they visit the site more than once a day.
But those are imperfect measures, and tracking engagement within a website is even more difficult. This month, I’ve been playing with new software, already in use on some major news sites, that offers a partial solution by tracking an unusual metric: how many times users copy text and images from each page — and what they’re copying.
Please believe me when I say this is turning into the most important blog I read every day.