Best Practices and Techniques for Increasing Page Views
I’ve been exploring a variety of ways to increase page views and sharing activity on websites. Here are a few techniques that I’ve seen lately that I found interesting… what have you seen?
A few seconds after a user watches a video on IGN, the page refreshes and brings the user to the next video. This seems like a clever way of encouraging a user to keep watching one video after another. If the user walks away from their machine for a while, it will also drive up preroll advertising inventory. Clever!
OKCupid is a free dating site with some clever user interface details. Their “OKTrends” blog has an interesting social media toolbar that swings into view when a user approaches the end of the blog entry.
Intuitively this makes a lot of sense; designers often place social bookmarking links at the top of the article, but users aren’t likely to respond to the suggestion that they share an article until after they have read it. Sure—seems obvious—but even big-time sites like the NY Times get this one wrong:
I do like the NY Times “Read the next article” widget that pops up as you approach the end of an article:
So what techniques do you use to increase page views and sharing of your content?