On Stickiness – Part 1

If you run Google Analytics, one of the metrics you should pay attention to is "Average time on site". This metric indicates just how sticky your site is. The longer people are on your site, the stickier it is.

The term "sticky" is a great term. Think of a sticky fly strip in which flies land and can't leave. That's the kind of site you want to create: One where your audience, prospects, and clients show up and are "stuck" to your site; they can't leave.

As a website owner, you need to figure out how to make your site sticky. I can't tell you exactly what to do because it's different for every website, every industry, and every audience demographic. However, here are some general ideas that tend to work for many situations.

The first thing you'll want to do is get the baseline. Find out what your visitor's average time on site has been and write it down somewhere. If you are serious about creating a website that builds a loyal audience, you'll want to measure this metric. (The maxim "what gets measured gets managed" is very true here).

Next, review how people typically look at your website. You might be able to tell this from Google Analytics or simply from feedback you get from your customers. Do they have a natural progression (i.e. Home > About > Products > Buy Now)? Find out where people are falling off of that pathway and shore it up. For example, if people get to your products page and review your testimonials only to click to client websites, you may want to remove the hyperlinks from those testimonials.

Then, you'll want to review the rest of your website for "exits". Exits are where your readers click to another site from a link on your page. If you link generously to outside websites more than you link to other places within your own site, you could be driving people away. It's not that you shouldn't have links pointing to external sites, but you should be mindful of their placement and of their potential impact on your business.

After that, increase the number of internal links to your site: Think about using various methods to encourage people to click around your site. Use tags, labels, categories, and other similar labeling in sidebars and in content. When someone reads one piece of content tagged with something interesting, they will be more likely to follow the same tag if it is clearly available to them.

Also, use lists (commonly found in blogs but also quite realistic to use in more conventional sites) that have "latest articles", "most popular topics", "if you liked this, you might also like these", and so on. These help to drive people deeper into your site.

Tune in later this week for another post that talks more about stickiness.