I dont know whats going wrong, but over 90% of my visitors dont stay for more than 10 seconds on my website http://rockingidea.com .. Any guidelines will be highly appreciated.
Another question: Where are you getting your numbers from? For some, less than 10 seconds equals one page view, even if they actually spent 10 minutes reading content. Question two: What does your visitors-to-page views ratio look like?
pages crowded with too much information + lazy ppl = quick closing ratio... maybe uncrowd the pages, and chang the color scheme to a less conventional pallette so that visitors dont get a "this is not worth the effort" feeling
Heck ya! We are in Website reviews, aren't we? (Sorry, got to this post via AdSense charts page - didn't notice the forum.) I think having Topics on the left side, even though there may be no posts, is a waste of space. I have to dig through the topics to see which ones have posts, and even then there's two numbers (1/0)? Weird. (I assume that the second one is how many I've posted in that area?) 1) Remove any topics with 0 posts. 2) Check the text for topics without any posts, like this one http://rockingidea.com/geeklog/public_html//index.php?topic=Food Right now, it says: No News to Display There are no news stories to display. There may be no news for this topic or your user preferences may be too restrictive for topic Food Emphasis my own. Clean her up. The home page is way too long as well. Shorten the page to, say, six posts. That way your left and right sides won't have as much space on the sides, and you'll have more page impressions. You'll also want to read through your copy again, with fresh eyes, and make sure it still makes sense. EDIT: I also think there's ad overkill on these pages. I see them, and that's all I see. The content just doesn't keep my eye. I read a couple, but there's nothing really good that keeps my eye. EDIT 2 (the last): Good idea, by the way. But per the above, you'll probably want to seed the home page with a handful of really good posts, instead of just posts from 'anonymous posters.
can't say much unless target source is known. Who knows, maybe he is buying traffic. Two skyscrapers on both sides doesn't help much to keep the traffic.
i doubt it. the thread poster don't even bother to reply to his own thread. I guess he got is answer. maybe this thread can be locked now.
Sorry for the late reply & thanks for your replies. I got these numbers from google analytics. I'll reply soon after reading all replies throughly.
For me I've noticed very short stays by visitors referred from text links on other sites, links they probably didn't know would make them leave the site they were on.
Now now, it had been less than an hour since OP. Pretty quick to lock threads, are you? Sites been registered since the 31st of last May ('06). Not a lot of time to gain much of a following the natural way, and too view posts to suggest any advertising of the site ...
Traffic is coming from: Direct - 56% ; page per visit: 1.5% google cpc - 24.7% ; 1.14% orkut refferal - 6% ; 1.19% yahoo organic - 4.12% ; 2.27 google organic - 3% ; 1.13 mcxtrade refferal - 1.87% ; 1.4% mail.google.com reffereal - 3% ; 2.63% Other... biziboy: I am looking for a good looking theme; but couldn't find one yet. Still looking for one. strivinglife: Thanks for your suggestions. Topics with 0 posts are necessary evil as a potential user should know what topics are there. The website is new, so any content even by anonymous seems to be important.
Is the Orkut advertising you? Organic SE traffic is pretty low ... and direct is pretty high (unless that's legit traffic). Re: topics: I'm not so sure. You could have a 'view the full list' item, but I'd hate to think that 0 post topics are necessary. After all, it seems like I could post on any topic I wanted to. You have to differentiate between people who just want to read the content, and people that want to participate in content creation. There was some research at least a couple of weeks ago that suggested that the majority of people still would rather read a site than participate in it by posting - only a minority of your visitors will actually post anything. The question is, to whom do you target your front page to? And, if you've got login capabilities, why not serve two slightly different pages to each type of visitor?
That's just my thoughts - I'm not by far an expert, but coming to your site as a 'stumbled upon this site, how would I interact with it', I'd be more interested in finding ideas on what is of interest to me. If I stumbled upon it in a natural search, then I would be interested in the idea I found, as well as ones in a similar topic. On the other hand, trying to look at how I might interact with the site as a poster of content, I would want to be able to post an idea about anything/a wide variety of topics (so, user-initiated topics). One more note: You may want to change the OP to a link - right now we have to directly copy and paste the URL into the address bar, which somewhat skews your data
I guess I should better change to a better software than geeklog. What do you suggest? (b2evolution?)
@austinium2002: I'm not familiar with either one. However, if they're any good, then you should be able to customize these calls without too much trouble. Just make note of your mods so you can bring them into future versions, as necessary.