How to convert new visitors into readers?

Using Articles report to boost effectiveness of your articles and improve audience engagement

VIEWS

Quantitative metric that helps to evaluate article popularity. High popularity is achieved by a well-chosen title and/or smart promotion.

It is widely accepted that page views represent article quality as well as readers’ interest. In fact, you can only evaluate how the article title draws user attention and how strongly demanded is this topic now.

Comparing publications by views only allows for scratching the surface, because a page view itself does not imply an interested visitor or one, who is further converted into a regular reader.

FINISHED READING

Qualitative metric showing such things as audience engagement level, possible information overload in the article, content and title correspondence as well as article impact on regular readers’ loyalty.

This metric estimates the degree of interest in certain content and shows the number of visitors, which were converted into readers and regular readers by the editors. Division by reading depth (up to 25%, 50%, and 100%) helps to evaluate the engagement and find the place where readers lose their interest.

Example

Two news articles with the same budget on writing and promotion were published simultaneously. As a result, the 1st article has 69,093 views, and the 2nd — 49,998. It may seem that the first article is doing better. But it’s share of finished readings is 24%, while the 2nd one has 85%.

The second article was read by 25,916 more people!

RECIRCULATION

Qualitative metric showing not only visitor engagement degree for a particular publication but also interest in the additionally proposed publications. This indicator is also called «Recirculation»

«Went further» or «Recirculation» is the most important indicator, which aids in building up readers’ retention for the website and convert them into regular readers. It shows the percent of readers who followed to the next page, regardless of whether they’ve read the current publication.

You can see a detailed analysis in further publication statistics and on «Next Page» tab. This tab shows where the audience go after reading this article.

Recirculation statistics are also displayed for each particular traffic source — it can be used to find the audience with a higher visit depth.

TIME ON PAGE

Qualitative metric that allows to evaluate the audience engagement.

Typically this indicator is used together with a read-through rate. It helps to determine readers’ engagement for short and long articles more precisely. Often this indicator helps to identify bots and traffic cheats from unfair partners.

FACEBOOK ACTIONS

Social media activity indicator: likes, shares and comments.

It allows to quickly notice the article gaining popularity on Facebook (or any other popular social media). A more detailed social media related review will be done in a separate article.

LET’S SUM IT UP

The perfect article should have:

• Maximum amount of views;
• 90%+ read-through rate (Finished reading);
• 50%+ recirculation (Went further);
• Time on page corresponding to the content amount;
• Lots of likes, reposts and comments for the article in social media and on the website.

HOW TO USE

Practical tips to increase readers’ engagement

Tip 1

Articles with high amount of views, read-through rate, and recirculation is reasonable to put on the home page, share them in social media, in other words — try to attract attention of the largest possible number of readers.

Tip 2

Lifetime of most news articles is about 2 hours if you miss the point — you’ll lose lots of traffic. As soon as you see the article’s potential, it’s essential to attract as much traffic as possible, which consequently will be retained using additional content (or «sticky features») for this article.

Result: promotion attracts the target audience that reads additional materials increasing visit depth and page views as well.

Tip 3

Edit the article immediately after publication, if its read-through rate is low. Change the pictures, cut the text or split it to gradually outline the publication’s point. In this way, readers don’t get bored with the article and likely proceed further after seeing a proposition read the second part.

Result: text becomes readable and interesting, increasing read-through rate and engagement.

Tip 4

Click on the desired article and go to «Next page» tab — it contains a list of pages where the readers go after visiting this article. If recirculation is low or «Homepage» is being a top one, instead of the articles (from «See also» and «Most popular» blocks), the provided content doesn’t meet readers’ interest and must be replaced.

Result: materials, relevant to the article, engage the reader to stay on the website, increasing recirculation and page views.

Tip 5

Traffic source often has a strong influence on recirculation. By analyzing «Source» tab you can find a target audience that is interested not only in this article but in the whole website. After finding the target audience source you can concentrate on promoting and attracting traffic from that source.

Result: 2nd source generated at least 4,239 views more than the 1st. Having equal budget for both sources, the second source appears to be more profitable to exploit.