I’m on a mission to increase the traffic to my site using Facebook ads. But before I spend the money I want to be sure that the visitors to this site get what they came here for. I also want to provide my blog subscribers with a consistent message that gives them a reason to remain as a subscriber.
If I drive traffic but don’t deliver people won’t want to come back. So I want to work out what content that people are responding to the best and write more of that.
Or, more importantly, I want to write more of what my target audience wants.
To work out what content is connecting with my readers the most I turned to Google Analytics. In the table below are listed my top 10 posts by page views 1/1/14 – 31/3/14. I’ve also included the time on page (that’s an indication of how much of the article people are reading), Facebook reactions (indicates audience engagement) and tweets (indicates perceived influence amongst Twitter audience).
| Lap | Time | Elapsed time | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2:57.12 | 2:57.12 | Solid start |
| 2 | 3:02.66 | 5:59.78 | Lost ground |
| 3 | 2:52.72 | 8:52.50 | Up and running |
| 4 | 2:52.81 | 11:45.3 | Consistent |
| 5 | 2:56.02 | 14:41.33 | |
| 6 | 3:01.62 | 17:42.95 | Traffic? |
| 7 | 2:59.62 | 20:42.57 | |
| 8 | 2:48.59 | 23:31.16 | Winding up for the finish |
| 9 | 2:47.95 | 26.19.11 | Setting up last lap. |
| 10 | 2:29.37 | 28:48.48 | Quick! |
These stats indicate that there’s a big difference between what attracts people to my site via search engines and what creates a reaction. Take a look at #2. That article, written as a study note while I was writing my honours thesis, is consistently my number one page for search traffic. It delivers something to readers because the time people spend on the site is one of the highest at 05:29. But, despite all the people who’ve read it, it’s generated almost no reaction on Facebook and Twitter. Quite possibly people are finding the article interesting to read but it doesn’t give them anything they didn’t already know. This is further indicated by a lack of back links to the post. If people found that it provided a useful new perspective they would be inclined to link to it from their own blog.
The other articles have little in common aside from that two of them are about real estate. As far as topics are concerned their appears to be little indication of what’s appealing to my audience.
I will say that the “you brought tears to my eyes” posts are way down the list when it comes to traffic generation. But in terms of generating reaction they kill the the Foucault on Confession post.
For example, the 10 Tips for a Happy Marriage post was only ever shared once on my social networks. Of the 308 pageviews it’s achieved so far most came within the first 36 hours of me sharing it on Facebook. Since then it’s achieved almost no pageviews.
The lack of traffic could be the result of a poor heading. And a poor heading is often the result of a weak argument.