Homepages: choose between frequency and session length

Posted by Jean Yves Chainon on March 21, 2007 at 3:38 PM

The Ecosphere blog dissects the usefulness of web user statistics. The length of a user’s visit and the frequency of visits are now just as important indicators as unique visitors. They also come to replace the misleading number of page views.

Taking these new indicators into account, Ecosphere grossly compares French users’ behavior on media websites as opposed to news portals.

According to Ecosphere, news portals aren’t that far ahead of news websites in terms of user behavior on site.

Surprisingly though, “community services such as blogs, forums and personal pages have almost no influence over the frequency of visits,” says Ecosphere, because they usually give direct access to content. This results in increased visit length and the number of page views.

On the other hand, customized and tailored pages are an important factor in increasing the frequency of visits.

Ecosphere’s findings are, self-admittedly, approximations. Web editors can use this knowledge to build their homepage though, whether they want to retain readers on their site or would rather have them return frequently.

Source: Echosphere through Ifra Executive News service