The Four Types of Visitors to Your Site: Who Are They and How Can You Hook Them?
How to think about your audience beyond pageviews
As content creators, we spend a lot of time and energy writing for the widest possible audience. We aim to maximize reach, and often, we measure our success based on our ability to achieve that reach: 73 percent of newsrooms focus their attention on pageviews alone rather than how readers are actually engaging with content.
But pageviews only tell one side of the story. This metric alone offers little understanding of your audiences’ needs and motivations. Many questions remain: Who is visiting your site? What do your audiences actually value? How do they engage with your content once they get there?
To answer these burning questions, leading publishers like The Atlantic are moving to a new data-driven approach. They’re expanding their focus from pageviews and unique visitors to include metrics that speak to loyalty and engagement.
By focusing on audiences’ behaviors and motivations rather than on traffic alone, we’ve identified four audience segments that can apply to all kinds of content operations.
These audiences are:
The Passersby: One-and-done visitors who make up the bulk of your traffic
The Occasionals: Visitors who come to you around once a month
The Regulars: Visitors who come to you multiple times per month, month after month
The Superfans: The small but devoted group who cares most about your work
“We want to make sure that we’re getting our journalism not only to a large audience, but also to a large group of active, engaged readers, viewers, and listeners.” — Bryan Davis, director of audience development, The Atlantic
At Atlantic 57, this framework has inspired some of the ways we’ve been thinking about audiences and building loyalty. We think organizations of all kinds can benefit from this type of approach to become more essential to the people they most want to engage.
If you’re interested in going deeper on this topic, we’ve created a detailed report where we share:
- A profile of each audience segment — including who they are, how they found you, and why they matter
- How to surface related content to increase time spent on your site
- How to deepen your relationship with readers through habit-forming products
- How simple changes to webpage layouts can lead to higher conversions
Visit our site today to download your copy.
Interested in learning more about our audience research and content strategy services? Check out our past work or sign up for our weekly newsletter, “The Five/Seven,” to receive the latest insights in media and tech, contextualized to power your work.
