Fish where the fish are and increase consumption of key content

Digital Marketers are always looking for ways to increase content consumption on their websites. The most obvious approach usually includes some sort of home page promotion, in the way of a banner, a button, or maybe a link that leverages the highest trafficked page on a website and provides the highest visibility. Digital Marketers should be already be striving for maximum visibility but there are additional opportunities to promote top content on your website that exist beyond the Holy Grail that is a website’s home page. These opportunities are accessed by understanding how users engage with your sites content as reported by the visitor path report available in many popular analytics platforms.

Key Takeaway – Leverage your pathing data to increase the number of opportunities visitors have to consume content

Target the top visitor paths

Visitors interact with a website in a fashion that yields a nearly infinite number of unique paths. The good news is that visitor behavior does tend to coalesce into some general groupings that account for a majority of activity on your website, largely due to design conventions and a shared set of needs among users. We can leverage these general groupings, or top paths, to provide additional opportunities for visitors to consume our most valuable content.

The roadmap for fishing where the fish are lives in the pathing reports of your web analytics solution. Below is a snapshot from Omniture’s SiteCatalyst Full Paths Report, as an example, that identifies the most popular complete paths visitors take through your site.

The top paths illustrate how the majority of visitors are navigating their way from page to page on a website. Normally we find the majority of visits are grouped into the top 10 paths for a website. This is where the most fish are, so now we’ve found our fishing hole, now let’s drop our pole in the water and start fishing.

Test adding key content to top path pages

These top paths provide the highest potential visibility opportunities for content, and if there is specific content you are pushing, whether it is a best practices guide, a new video series, or simply increasing email subscriptions, the pages that are a part of these top paths grant you the biggest audience and largest opportunity to get that content downloaded, viewed, or signed up for.

Start by analyzing the top paths using a time frame that reaches a critical mass of visitor traffic that represents a solid benchmark for analysis. Depending on content strategy and how often user experience changes are made on a website 3-6 months of data usually provides a meaningful sample. Identify synergies between the content you want to promote and pages in your top paths. Where there is some level of synergy between the page and the promotional content, consider testing calls-to-action that are effective but don’t supersede the primary goals of these highly trafficked pages. Avoid stealing visual primacy from the primary goal or CTA with promotional content that might interfere with what is already a positive and successful user experience.

Monitor the impact and apply lessons learned

Pushing key content on top path pages changes the user experience. It’s important to closely monitor the impact of these changes to not only understand the impact on content consumption but to also be sensitive to the impact these changes may make on overall visitor behavior within these top paths. Leverage the conversion strategies and successes of top path pages that increase consumption to increase consumption for underperforming pages.

There are additional opportunities to increase conversions and promote top content if we simply fish where the fish are and pathing reports within your analytics platform can point the way to finding those fishing holes and set us up for a season of increasing content consumption and conversion.

Here at ROI Labs we’ve done quite a bit of work with clients helping them leverage key visitor paths, test and optimize high traffic pages, and develop promotional strategies for increased consumption and conversion. If you have questions about how to get started please feel free to contact us.