According to Nielsons, the average American visited 111 internet domains in March. He/she also went to 2,554 web pages in and spent an average of 56 seconds, on each page.
The problem is that the activity of each individual is very different – from the guy in the basement who is on the internet all day every day to the person up in the hills who doesn’t have mains electricity What’s more, the type of site varies deeply from (for example) The Guardian to pornographic sites (not that I have any knowledge of the latter you understand).
But, it is interesting – this 56 seconds. What the figures suggest is that people move around at high speed from place to place – and we still have that age old problem not only of getting them to the site, but also getting them to stay there.
There are all sorts of ways of doing this, and it does very much depend on the type of product you have and the type of audience you attract. One way that works for my company involves the in-depth article written with a bit of personal input – but this is not relevant for everyone.
What does strike me as important however is that one should focus on the issue in relation to one’s web site. I get the feeling that for many web sites no one has bothered to focus on them at all – that somehow they have evolved on the basis that “we must tell the reader this” – multipled by ten.
So my suggestion is that one looks at the web site and says:
What are we doing to grab the reader’s attention?
What are we doing to keep the reader here once he/she has arrived?
At least by asking the questions one starts to take a step forward.
Tony
This article was first published on Education Marketing – a free daily news feed for firms involved in selling into schools in the UK. To subscribe to the feed you need to send an email – click here.