Over the last week I’ve run some Crazy Egg heat map tracking on two posts on Digital Photography School (both of which got to the front page of Digg and got a lot of traffic) that both highlight to me a very simple method of increasing the number of pages that people view when they visit your blog.
Let me illustrate with a screen capture of the heat map from my post - How to Avoid Camera Shake:
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What you’re looking at above is the ‘hottest’ zone on the post. It is the most clicked upon part of the page. This section of the page was clicked on just under 2000 times over the duration of this test. The full page had just under 6000 clicks.
What stands out for me is that the section of the page you’re viewing above is a long way from the top of the post. While the general rule is that people click more on links at the tops of posts - this section of the page is only viewable once you’ve hit ‘page down’ 7 times!
The first two links in the section are links to my subscription page and a byline link to the author of the post - but the other five are all internal links to other articles on the blog. This means 1800 or so of the visitors to this page viewed at least one other page on the blog.
The ‘Further Reading on Camera Shake’ links were ones that I manually added to the post and the ‘Read more posts like ‘How to….’ links were automated links generated with a WP Plugin.
Lets look at another example
In this test (on a post on ‘Jowling‘) I’m showing you the same section of the page. This time I had to hit ‘page down’ 5 times to get to it. Again it’s low on the page and again I’ve got the automated links as well as two others in the ‘A Couple of other things….’ section.
Once again - this is the hottest part of the page in terms of clicks with around 1600 clicks (all internal) out of 6500 clicks on the full page.
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Why do readers click links so far down the page?
It might seem a little odd that links so far down a page would be clicked on at such a high rate - but the reason that it happens is quite logical. These points on the page are what I call ‘pause points’. They are parts of a page where readers pause and make a decision on what to do next.
These sections are all at the end of articles - a point where readers end one activity and look to do another one. Many readers simply hit ‘back’ at this point or head to Google to search for something else - however when you give them something else to do or read you have a decent chance of convincing them to stay on your site.
Other Things to Do at Pause Points
There are of course other things that you can do in these ‘pause points’ on a blog including:
- Advertising - this is a ‘hot zone’ in terms of CPC ads
- Affiliate Programs - I don’t find they convert as well as CPC ads here but they can work
- Social Bookmarking - many bloggers run social bookmark buttons in this spot to encourage readers to vote for the post
- Subscription Invitations - this is a great place to get conversions from first time readers to subscribe to your blog
Really any key conversion goals that you want to achieve can work in a ‘Pause Point’ - although when you put too many options in that point for readers you probably dilute the conversion rate. What else do you put in ‘pause points’?
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