I run a gaming website, people can come read about games view screenshots and watch gameplay videos of it, but each unique I get only turns into an average of 2.4 pageviews, now, no need to sugar coat it I know this is garbage. How can I raise this?
Dkin... What you want is what everybody wants. You could try offering more interesting content. More sections. afriendlier design. A daily/weekly/monthly games newsletter (with the user's approval). You could also try to make your website more accesible. If the visitor doesn't find what he's after, quickly, he'll just get out and search Google, or the next website in your niche Anyway, the unique to page views conversion is very hard to increase in some niches. You are happy. You could have even a 10 ratio Make a forum or something similar.
I had the same problem on one site. The solution is to add more content, the more good content you have on your site, the more time people will spend browsing it.
Well, it could be the type of content. Say you are interested in the latest games. You come to the site. Look at the latest game review and go away. The number of page views will be small. However, the site could still be healthy IF those people return again and again every day. So look at your returning visitors too.
To know that you can use a counter service like http://www.addfreestats.com It tells you a lot about your site visitors. It's not 100% accurate since many people browse using proxys, but it can give you an idea.
How are the user's finding the site? It may be their perception of what they will encounter when they goto the site doesn't match they actually find? For example, if you run banner ads for "Sexy Gamer Babes" and then your site features content of babies playing with rattles ... well, you get the point. So, how you drive the traffic and how well the message that drives them to the site matches the content of the site is going to have a big impact on how long they stay. Also, don't discount the look & feel ... especially on a gaming site, the feel of it could have a huge impact.
That is true, Nitin. But if I saw a site that implied babies were "Sexy", I would be reporting it to the child welfare authorities...
the majority of my visitors, say 80% are through google images, which I dont like, I want more from google than google images.
I got the same problem as you dkin. The more reviews/previews/features I put, the longer people stay. I get about 30% of my traffic from google images, and another 35% from search engines. Google images aren't very good for visitor page views, or making money :/ . Stick in there.
dkin, you need to make sure visitors have attractive options to progress more into your site. put options in front of them, where they can see them. for blogs for example, one suggestion to improve site stickiness is to put a list of related posts in front of the user when they have got to the end of a post. You can read more about this at problogger. Although this is about blogs specifically the principle equally applies to websites. Also seen as though you are getting so much traffic from google images, how about offering more images. "If you liked these images, you might also be interested in these ones...". thomas