Social media
Outbound Links are Gold
Filed under: Google, Ideas, Surveys and stats, Tools
Few days ago I looking how to measure your social media success with Google Analytics. Today I was looking for ways to understand our website visitors and stumbled on a very interesting pattern. People who click on links that take them away from your site are the most engaged lot of them all. I haven’t seen this line of reasoning anywhere so I share it here with you.
Google Analytics lets you track outbound clicks and I created a segment that contained only the visitors who click out of our site. What I found is that only 6 percent of our readers click on outbound links.
But these 6 percent are really engaged. They intentionally clicked on something and they took the time to read about what to click on. The numbers are really amazing: the people who click on outbound links visit twice as many pages as the average visitor. They spend 5.9 times more time on site than average user.
Now the dreaded analyst’s question: so what? Well, people who click on outbound links convert 3,5 times better than average.
Now you can look at what makes people click and create more content that engages your readers. Click on this link to add the segment of outbound clickers to your Google Analytics account or you can create it manually as seen on the image above.
Posted on: May 6, 2011
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