Average Page Views Per Visitor and Related Post Plugins

While analyzing the stats for Technology Evangelist the other day, I came across this interesting graph reporting the average number of page views per visitor by month:

It very common for a blog's page views per visitor to hover somewhere just above 1, since people tend to arrive at a blog through a search engine, read the post related to why they came, then leave. Or, if they hit the homepage, they can read multiple posts while chalking up one page view.

But something changed on Technology Evangelist earlier this year, causing our page average page views per visitor to start ramping up. Suddenly, we marched past two pages per visitor and then beyond three in May.

Here are four theories:

1. Increased post volume. Regular visitors will visit more often if we simply publish more stories.

2. More cross linking. There are more opportunities to link to previous articles from new articles as the site grows larger.

3. Increase in RSS feed subscribers: regular readers keep coming back.

4. Increase in blog comments: each posted comment guarantees an additional page view, plus potential revisits for subscribed comments.

I'm not sure which one, or which percentage of each, is making the difference in this case yet. Care to weigh in?

However, on another blog I run on a Wordpress platform, I noticed a recent spike in page views/visit that I can tie to a specific change in the site. Here is a graph of the change in page views per visitor:

The change? Installing a Related Posts plugin. Giving people easy access to additional related content keeps people interested longer.

Of course, this led to the installation of a similar plug-in on this Movable Type powered blog. This was less than smooth. First, pages wouldn't rebuild if there was only one post in a category. Then, it didn't seem to have an obvious way to create/remove a title for that sub-section of the site page based on whether there is no other posts. It also only pulls from the post's primary category. So, it's an improvement, but falls a bit short of what the comparable Wordpress version delivers.

If you have any ideas on how to conditionally display the Related Posts section based on whether there actually are related posts, let me know.

I think you are doing a great job with your comments at fellow tech blog. I use the Similar Posts plugin - you might want to give it a try.

60 in 3, I've updated the link above to a different URL with the plugin info & download code.

I've had my blog running for about 10 days now and according to Google analytics I'm getting 3.81 average page views which seems quite reasonable, and 6:07 minutes time on site. Of course, as has just been mentioned the usefulness of these figures depends on how you look at them. Does it mean people couldn't find what they were looking for (and so stayed longer than they would have liked) or something else? Anyway, I think I'll give a related posts plugin a try and see what happens. The technologyevangalist.com looks like a good site and I'll probably be coming back to it in the future. Feel free to post a message on my blog too, if you are interested.

I don't like traditional Related posr plugins, because they based on contex nalysis. What ever the content analysis algorithms are and how ever the configuration options used, resulting related post lists are mostly just a bullsh$%.
Alternative way is:
http://alexander.holbreich.org/2009/01/best-related-post-plugin/

Comments

1. Posted by: kucau on June 18, 2007 10:57 AM:

there is wp plugin dealing with related post BUT u have to manually select related posts. cumbersome if u got many posts. i`ve forgotten the name of the plugin.

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