Once you’ve made the decision to start authoring educational blog articles in order to boost your word-of-mouth referrals, you may find that some of the terminology is confusing at first – but knowing what it means can greatly improve your ability to maximize your site. For the purposes of this article we’re going to focus primarily on WordPress, but the same holds true for many of the different blogging platforms.
What is the difference between a new visitor and a returning visitor?
That question is usually decided by the cookies that are on the visitor’s browser. For instance, someone blocking cookies or clearing them out in between uses would be counted as a new visitor or, whereas a user with cookies would be counted as a returning visitor, if they’ve been to your site before.
What is a bounce or bounce rate?
A bounce means that somebody came to your blog/site and viewed a page without doing anything else before they left, either by clicking back or typing in a different address into their browser. In other words, they came, and they left – it doesn’t matter how long they were there – they could have been there for half an hour but it still counts as a bounce.
With blogs, one does tend to see a high bounce rate if there is an established audience, because they’ve previously explored the other posts and pages on the site – or they’ve seen your blog on a social media channel on LinkedIn or through your email newsletter, and so they clicked through to read that specific blog post but aren’t compelled to click around.
Conversely, if they click on anything that keeps them within the site/blog, then they are a non-bounce visitor.
What is “engagement” and how is it measured?
Engagement measures what the visitor does once when they arrive on your site.
- Did they visit other pages or blog posts?
- Did they watch your videos?
- Did they subscribe to your newsletter, or perform any other activity while they were there?
More advanced analytic tools can measure this behavior granularly, but most built-in analytics in blogs like WordPress can only tell you what their behavior was in general terms, after they landed on your site. From a trending perspective, tracking engagement/behavior gives you a sense of whether you are developing an audience, and what those site/blog visitors’ interests are.
What is a landing page?
When people come to your site/blog, the page or post they first arrive at is considered the landing page. If you’re doing a WordPress blog, every blog post, and every page has its own Search Engine Optimization (SEO). So if they’re searching for a particular phrase or subject, through SEO they may get one of your blog posts or pages in their search results that they click through to directly. In this circumstance, the landing page is not your homepage, but rather the specific blog post or page of your site. Likewise, if they’ve arrived via a link from your newsletter to your blog post, that will take them directly to that blog post, which would then be the landing page. Paying attention to the source of the visitor and what page or post they land on gives you feedback on the effectiveness of your various marketing channels (SEO, newsletter, social media, etc.).
So take the time to look at whatever traffic monitoring tools you have for your blog/website to gain valuable perspective on what you want to blog about in the future.
We’ve written several articles about using blogging and social media to foster Word of Mouth referrals.
Feel free to check them out at phoneBlogger.net/Blog.
We’d love to hear your feedback –
you can comment or ask questions in the “Leave a Reply” section below!
Mark Bullock
Telephone: (631) 754-0800
Email: Mark@phoneBlogger.net
Website:phoneBlogger.net
It seems odd, but I don’t think that I ever before read a definition of “landing page.” Thanks, Mark.
You’re welcome Virginia. Indeed “landing page” can have a couple of different meanings.
1 – A single page web site, usually developed for a specific marketing or subscription campaign.
2 – Any page or blog post the the visitor “lands on” when clicking through from a link on social media, another website, an email, etc.
It might also help to note, that in the world of blogging, if setup correctly, every page & blog post get’s it’s own SEO / listing with the search engines. So if you write about a specific topic in a post, depending on a bunch of different factors, Google or any other search engine may serve up your post specifically in a search result, to a searcher looking for related keywords to your topic.
In that case, the post becomes the “landing page” for that visitor as Google links the search result to the post directly, vs your home page – as an example.
Thanks for the comment:-)