Here is an interesting article posted by or friends in clicktracks.
It points out the benefits of adding a blog to your website.
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In this startup organization, there was certainly no shortage of things to do—only a shortage of time to do them. Founder and chief instigator Bryan Zmijewski* had a hunch that one of the first things they should do after the site went live was to create and maintain a LuckyOliver blog. But with so many tasks on everyone’s to do lists, should blog activities—adding posts, replying to comments and encouraging interaction—be something that was treated as a priority? Bryan turned to ClickTracks to see if a corporate blog would be a good use of the company’s time.
Dozens of Blog Posts, Zero Comments
“When we first started the blog, I encouraged all of the LuckyOliver staff to post, at least once or more a week. And they did—but after two weeks of posting, I found myself relatively alone on the blog. When I asked folks why they weren’t posting, they told me that they had other things to do and didn’t think anyone was reading the blog anyway. I think that the initial lack of comments was discouraging to them, so I had to figure out if the blog really was valuable, even if no one was actively commenting.”
Blog Increases Average Time on Site by 60%
In ClickTracks’ navigation report, Bryan could see that people were reading the blog—the numbers were initially low, but not non-existent. Then, he focused on one particular metric: Average time on site. “Over the years, I’ve found Average Time on Site (ATOS) to be a real indicator of how interested people are in your product or service. In ClickTracks’ advanced label wizard, I set up a label that tracked everyone who had visited the blog page. Then I compared visitors who saw the blog page with visitors who didn’t. Even I was surprised by the results—people who read the blog spend about 60% more time on the site than people who didn’t.”
Bryan shared this news with the team, and blog posts increased.
Blog Readers are 22% More Likely To Sign Up for an Account
But Bryan’s search for metrics didn’t stop there. Shortly after his ATOS revelation, Bryan decided to push his ClickTracks labels another step further. “By this time, just looking at the number of comments we were receiving confirmed more blog activity—and a quick glance at ClickTracks’ site overview report confirmed that page views for the blog were climbing higher. What I now wanted to know was if the blog had a direct correlation to our site’s sign up activity—were visitors who read the blog more or less likely to sign up for a LuckyOliver account?”
Using the label wizard, Bryan created two labels—one for visitors who saw the blog, and another for visitors who saw the ‘thank you’ confirmation page that occurs at the end of the sign up process. Then, he combined the labels via the advanced label wizard, telling ClickTracks to pinpoint visitors who met both criteria. The result? A visitor who saw the blog was 22% more likely to sign up for a LuckyOliver account than one who hadn’t. Additionally, the average time on site and number of page views for those newly signed up blog viewers was double that of the average visitor.
*In the interest of full disclosure, Bryan’s other business ZURB is a ClickTracks contractor. If you like the ClickTracks blue guy, thank Bryan!