First of all, here a few reasons why you should worry about page views and why more is better particularly if you are interested in leveraging content to drive ebusiness:
- More page views means visitors spend more time on your website. It means that they like what you have. Thus, they are more likely to come back, tell others about you, and also trust you more. All the indicators that they are likely to perform a positive action (a sale, a signup or a click on an advertisement)
- While there are several metrics used to measure the popularity of a website, page views is one of them. While many websites (e.g. Yahoo) can claim to have a large number of page views because every time a visitor goes to the website they check their emails or weather or read the news. All of these count as multiple page views and such portal type websites typically tend to have 10-15 page views per visitor. If you run a website like MYNIPPON, however, then none of these things happen. That is why, even a page view metric of 3 is a good number.
- While the good old days of impression based advertising are almost over and whatever little is left is likely to disappear soon (except for maybe some very large websites), when you have more page views you can present more ads to each visitors increasing the prospects of a desirable action from the visitor.
How to increase page views?
We will share here the learnings we have had from Lindisima which has a page view metric of 11 and from our recent experience of doubling the page view of MYNIPPON from 1.5 to 3.0.
- Insert one or two highly relevant links. We suggest one link in the body of the article (so that if the reader does not like the article, she or he can click on the link rather than hit the 'back' button) and one at the end (if the reader loves your article and likes the website and is open to read more on your website).
- Create a "What's new" banner at the bottom. That way you can highlight your new articles. A characteristic of human beings is that they like "new" stuff. You can also automate this process by using simple javascript. If you want to see how this bar looks, take a look at this page. If you want to use the content syndication technique that we use, you are welcome to copy the code from our website.
- Split long articles into sections. What really bores and scares visitors is a really long article without headings and breaks. However, if you break the article into several pages and provide a good navigation, visitors are likely to visit other pages.