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5 Strategies to Lower Your Site’s Bounce Rate
Mallary by Mallary Jean Tenore
Jean Published Feb. 18, 2010 12:55 pm
Tenore
There are lots of ways to draw users to news sites. The trick is figuring out how
to keep them engaged enough to stay on your site once they land there.
Some news sites, including Forbes.com, The Huffington Post and DailyMe,
have developed strategies to increase engagement and decrease bounce rates
— a metric used to describe the percentage of single-page site visits, often
traffic referred by search engines.
Here are a few examples of their strategies, along with some additional tips
that could help keep people on your site. I hope you’ll share your ideas, too.
Collect data about what people are looking at on your site and show them
more content like it. The folks at DailyMe, a site that provides a roundup of
the day’s news from various media outlets, has created a new technology
called Newstogram.
The cookie-based technology, which is being marketed to various news
organizations, does a metadata analysis to identify keywords, names, places
and other relevant information in the stories that users read. Based on the
results, the technology finds stories that a user is likely to be interested in.
Links to these stories appear in a module that news organizations can embed
on their sites. The technology can also tell when a person already has read a
particular story, so it offers new content.
Neil Budde, president and chief product officer of DailyMe, said that when
DailyMe tested Newstogram on its own site using a personalized headline
display versus a default set of top headlines, the personalized headlines had 25
to 35 percent more click-throughs. The Boston Globe and The Telegraph in
Nashua, N.H., are testing the module, he said, and others have expressed
interest in the analytics it provides.
“The reason that we think this is important is that basically the game online is a
matter of real estate,” Budde said. “You have all these people who come once,
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