Side Door Traffic, and What it Means for Brands
The Homepage is Dying, and that’s OK
At Atlantic Media Strategies, we often discuss the rise of “side-door” traffic and what it means for our clients. All sites — those of media companies, organizations and brands alike — are seeing a clear trend. Homepage traffic is down, and more users are arriving via article/content pages, skipping the homepage altogether.
Quartz’s Zach Seward has a great piece up about the trend and its impact on sites like The New York Times. He includes this (poorly scanned) graphic from an internal NYT strategy report (via Buzzfeed).
It’s appropriate that Quartz is exploring and explaining this trend — it was designed with side-door traffic top of mind. It has, in effect, no homepage. Instead, the users who do arrive via theqz.com URL find themselves already in a stream of content.
Quartz’s approach was revolutionary, and it worked. But organizations and brands need a slightly different version of this approach. Even as think tanks, non-profits, and corporations take on more publisher-like roles and create more of their own content, their sites still need to serve some legacy purposes. That means they can’t necessarily take the same bold leap at Quartz.
But the lessons learned still apply. Each piece of content needs to serve as a pseudo-homepage on its own. It has to accomplish a dual purpose: allowing users to engage and immerse themselves in the piece of content that first brought them to the site, and encouraging them to dive deeper and discover more content from across it.
That is not an easy task. But a few key principles can help brands along the way.
Deliver the content promised first. Users came to your site’s side door because a particular article, video, or other piece of content they found interesting. Give them that content first. Don’t launch pop-up windows or slide-in ads at the top of the page in an effort to get another click out of them. It won’t work. They are far more likely to get frustrated and abandon the initial article than to click and dig deeper.
Clean design and layout is a must. Gone are the days when a cluttered right rail counts as acceptable design. Readers — especially those on mobile devices and tablets — expect a clean format where the focus is the content itself. A great example is The Atlantic’s new feature template.
Surface other relevant content. Relevant is the key word. What doesn’t work: modules surrounding an article with other content important to the organization but not to readers. Instead, sites need to surface items that are actually useful. The levels of personalization and the technological lift can vary — the principle should not. And of course, keep the experience clean. Surface additional content at the bottom, after users have had a chance to engage fully, or in-line with the text when there is a clear and relevant link.
Of course, these principles are just a start. Each organization will face unique challenges in building the right experience for side-door users. AMS is here to help — feel free to drop me a note via Twitter (@oryrinat) or LinkedIn message with questions and thoughts!
