I was digging around in our IndexTools account today for the SEOmoz site and came across a nifty column that I had previously ignored called "browse rate". It shows, based on the entry page the visitor came to the website on, how many pages (on average) they browsed. This metric is great for determining how effective your pages are at pulling people into the website.
Here's some stats for SEOmoz:
You can see how folks who entered on the Web 2.0 Awards are not big browsers, nor are the folks using Matt's IP Geo-location tool. But, when folks come via our homepage - 6.32 pages get visited on average, which is pretty sweet!
Hi Rand..
If you find the "Browse Rate" Metric interesting you should try adding a couple of the new IndexTools 9.0 metrics to this or any other report.
A) Revenue Participation B) Action Participation
I think they for you are pretty self explanatory – but quickly: Action Participation will tell you that e.g.: 80% of your positive newsletters signup actions (visitors) read the page “Beginners Guide to SEO” – this meaning that even though a page like that typically would not be part of a Funnel (Scenario Analysis) – it’s still a major contributor to your newsletter signups. Thus these can be used to measure the value / contribution a single page has on Revenue or Actions.
NB: I am just using your site and terms as an example; I have of course NOT looked at your data.
:-)
Take care Rand. I will of course be in San Jose again this year…
Kind regards, Dennis R. Mortensen COO, IndexTools
I think that the browse rate can be useful. I run a similar metric on the main entry pages of my site and it tells me what entry points provide the most site engagment. Also, if you have "related info" menus at the bottom of every article or side bar features this info can be useful in determining how effective a change in presentation might be.
I think that if you have a high traffic site, this is info is worth a lot of research and testing. If you have highly engaging locations on your site would it not be smart to promote them a little more on the other pages of your site (assuming you have an info site or another site where success is based upon engagement).
I think is somewhat normal, since those who enter the site directly on the article page are usually SE visitors and, most important, those that use RSS readers. Since I usually read every article as it appears on the site, it is normal behaviour from my part to close the site afterwards, instead of visiting again the articles I already read. More, I never visit the homepage of your site... actually, I think I visited it today again, for the first time since first coming here (several months ago).
This being said, it is not such a trustful metric, since I assume you have quite a lot of users that read the site by RSS.