Average Page Views Down?

Well it’s a new month, and this is where I like to usually brag about the changes I made to my site. I set the goal, I go after it, and usually with some success the mission is achieved. For September it was all about attacking my average pageviews per person. I wanted that number to go up. Too bad it didn’t.

Blogging

In the blogging world, keeping or getting a high page view per visitor is a challenge. In August I averaged just 1.92 page views per session. My goal for this is currently 2.5. It may be a bit of a stretch. I don’t do many series posts, one of the best ways to get more page views, and even if I did, I don’t think I will hit the goal that way. I need something more, and looking at what I did in September to improve it you will see it’s going to have to be something hot.

Website Owner? If you have just 2.5 page views per session, you may have a problem. Blogs are a different creature, and unless the blogger is writing ten posts a day, extra page views will simply not be generated that easily.

Below is a screenshot taken from Alexa. Looking average page views per visitor you can see 2.0 is not an easy goal for a blogger.

What I Did Didn’t Help

August, my average was 1.92. September the average was 1.91. I went down just a tiny bit, so no real  major concern. Some of this was influenced by Google search results. It was, however, a disappointment. The good news is though, every thing else improved. Uniques went up, bounce went down by another percent, and time on site went up.

Here is what I did, my expectations, and the apparent outcome. You keep a journal of your changes, right? See Journal Analytics.

Linked Thumbnail to Post – The first thing I did was to make the thumbnails of images of the home page link to the post. I thought this was an easy way to increase page views. It turns out, though used, made little to no difference. Visitors were just using an alternate method to get to the post besides the text link.

Listed More Related Posts – I have always used this, and so do the visitors. I used to only show five links though, and my change now shows ten. I suspected that it may help just a little. Reality? It didn’t, or at least not enough to make a noticeable difference. This may have had a positive side effect though. I believe it improved my keyword density. Search traffic is on a major rise for me recently. Also, don’t believe they hype you may read how it turns your bounce from 80% to 5% by adding a related post feature to your blog. It’s not true. It may help, but not like that.

Tested Several Headers Under the Post – If you look at the bottom of this post you will notice a light blue box where my related posts are listed. On top of that box I have a header where I help market some of my items or posts. Trying a new one every week nothing seemed to call out more than the other. I was/am fishing for the perfect call to action that says click me more than anything else. I have also been experimenting with this by changing my signatures in forums. Forum signatures make a great place to test drive stuff like this. In October? Still testing.

For October

Though I failed making any improvements to average page views I still do benchmarking tests for this site. Who knows, maybe everyone else did poorly for page views this month. Here is how I do my test if you don’t know already: How to Fix Your Site.

It turns out my average page views per visitor is no longer my weakest link. It’s total page views, and that has been something that has been a constant nag for me on this particular site. It’s also something  that could be fixed by increasing the average page views per visitor, September’s goal. How will I go about increasing it this time? I’m not actually sure, but I suspect it may be a simple matter of marketing.