Pageviews on a website are very important to a Blogger. It is often overshadowed from pageviews but pageviews per visitor and pageviews are totally different things: pageviews measures the total amount of pages viewed on your site whereas pageviews per visitor shows the average number of pages a visitor goes to on your website. Either way, increasing the amount of pageviews per visitors is more important than actually increasing total pageviews itself. With Google Analytics, you can decide what what action to do from the in depth analyse Google offers.
Let’s start with a little maths. Let’s say a website has 10,000 visitors a month with pageviews per visitor at 1.5. That means the website will have 15,000 pageviews. If you increase the visitors by 25% so there are 12,500 visitors a month, the pageviews will increase to 18,750 pageviews: 3,750 pageviews increase. If you didn’t change the visitors but increase your pageviews per visitor to 2, your pageviews would increase to a whopping 20,000! I’m just trying to tell you that you don’t need new or more visitors. Sometimes, you got to keep the visitors that are on your website already. For more on keeping visitors on a website, Click here.
Let’s start off with where you can find you pageviews per visitor. On your Google Analytics dashboard look for the button that says ‘Pages/Visit’. By clicking on it will take you to this screen:
As you can see, Google Analytics offers both a line graph and table to show your pageviews per visitors. From my results, my Pages/Visits is 3.07, a number I’m at the moment quite satisfied with. However, this number a few months ago was severely low, being 1.2 meaning only 1 in 12 people actually visited two or more pages on my website, oh dear.
Since then, I have used my findings to redesign and add parts to my website to help increase this number, as like I said before, pageviews per visitor is more important than the number of visitors you have. Here’s a list of what I did:
- Add ‘Related Posts’ at the end of every blog post – After a visitor has finished reading an article, they are in a state of mind in which they want to carry on reading. That’s why it is best to put related posts at the end of a post. What more, it offers relevant information that could be useful to the reader. For more on adding Related posts to Blogger, Click here.
- Try to gain Loyal Readers – You might not believe it but no matter what the content is, some people reader every article posted on websites. These loyal readers help dramtically increase your pages/visit. To get loyal readers, you can use methods such as RSS Feeds, social networking to keep people attached to your website.
- Outbound and Inbound Links – Outbound links move visitors away from a site while inbound links move visitors onto other pages within your site. My motto on this is to have only advertising as outbound links. This way, every time someone leaves due to an outbound link, I know it would have made a bit of money.
- Keep pages loading quickly – This may sound basic but the amount of people that get bored of waiting for pages to load and just give up is huge. Try to keep JavaScript to a minimum and that will help make pages load faster.
- Make Series – Making series of articles such as ask will online’s Blogger Newbies Series or Analysing Google Analytics will keep visitors hooked to a website increasing pages/visit.
- Have a Helpful Sidebar – The sidebar of a website holds everything necessary for the visitor to stay on a website. If a sidebar doesn’t do this, it may need redesigning as that is one of the main purposes of the sidebar.
