How To's Digital Strategies E-Media Tidbits

Mallary

Jean

Tenore

by Mallary Jean TenorePublished Feb. 18, 2010 12:55 pm

There are lots of ways to draw users to news sites. The trick is figuring out how

to keep them engaged enough to stay on your site once they land there.

Some news sites, including Forbes.com, The Huffington Post and DailyMe,

have developed strategies to increase engagement and decrease bounce rates

— a metric used to describe the percentage of single-page site visits, often

traffic referred by search engines.

Here are a few examples of their strategies, along with some additional tips

that could help keep people on your site. I hope you’ll share your ideas, too.

Collect data about what people are looking at on your site and show them

more content like it. The folks at DailyMe, a site that provides a roundup of

the day’s news from various media outlets, has created a new technology

called Newstogram.

The cookie-based technology, which is being marketed to various news

organizations, does a metadata analysis to identify keywords, names, places

and other relevant information in the stories that users read. Based on the

results, the technology finds stories that a user is likely to be interested in.

Links to these stories appear in a module that news organizations can embed

on their sites. The technology can also tell when a person already has read a

particular story, so it offers new content.

Neil Budde, president and chief product officer of DailyMe, said that when

DailyMe tested Newstogram on its own site using a personalized headline

display versus a default set of top headlines, the personalized headlines had 25

to 35 percent more click-throughs. The Boston Globe and The Telegraph in

Nashua, N.H., are testing the module, he said, and others have expressed

interest in the analytics it provides.

“The reason that we think this is important is that basically the game online is a

matter of real estate,” Budde said. “You have all these people who come once,

5 Strategies to Lower Your Site’s Bounce Rate

5 Strategies to Lower Your Site’s Bounce Rate | Poynter. http://www.poynter.org/how-tos/digital-strategies/e-media-tidbit...

1 of 1 12/6/10 2:22 PM