Stuart left a comment on a previous post pointing to some traffic graphs of a few of Weblogs Incs that he was interested that none of the WIN blogs seem to have an average of more than 2 page views per visitor.
I replied to Stuart’s comment that I’d be interested to see how this compared to other blogs and that someone should research it.
As I hit publish on that comment I decided that perhaps I could do a quick survey of blogs and find out for myself what is ‘normal’ for the page views per visitor statistic.
So today I took a look at the top 50 blogs in Truth Laid Bear’s ranking by traffic page (note that this only measures blogs with sitemeter stats packages – and there are some real inaccuracies with it as at present it seems to be being gamed by the sports blog network).
Despite the inaccuracies of this list it’s a quick way to get a picture of how some of the webs most visited blogs are going in terms of their stats as all have the same public stats package available for comparison.
After surfing the top 50 blogs listed there (I couldn’t find stats on 6 of them) I found that on average they have 1.7272 page views per visitor. The highest any of them had was 3.3 page views per visitor and the lowest was 1.1.
I then decided to see if this figure was comparable to blogs with less traffic and then surveyed a random 50 blogs from other pages on the traffic rankings. These ranged in traffic from about 10,000 visitors per day down to just a few visitors per day.
The average of these 50 random blogs was 1.7083 page views per visitor – a remarkably similar figure to the higher trafficked blogs.
While my ‘research’ is far from scientific or accurate it’s an interesting figure. The average blog reader spends looks at less than two pages per visit.
I don’t have figures to compare this to other types of websites but this number seems depressingly low. As I wrote in my comment replying to Stuart – there could be many reasons for this. Perhaps it’s because blogs tend to have so many outbound links, perhaps its because the way they are designed doesn’t tend to push people deeper into the site, perhaps its because the most visited page on a blog is usually the front page which tends to have a number of posts on it (meaning a reader can read 10 or so pages worth of content without leaving the one page). I’m sure there are other reasons – but the question it might leave some asking is what strategies might one put in place to maximize page views on your blog?
I’ll unpack this question in the coming days.
