From time to time, I get offers from people to help out with the club and the web site. Which ends up meg, they disappear and I end up doing the work. Such is the case of a person who said, you got to have Google Analytics. Fine, a month passes and well the usual happens.
So I end up getting a book on the subject at the library. One of the stats which I knew of before Google had to tell me was ‘Bounce Rate‘. An annoying stat that puts the obvious problem of running a wiki has. It’s great in pulling in web searches but pretty lousey at getting people pass the page they land on. Which in our case, is hundreds of pages.
So how do you get people to click past the first page they find on your wiki?
I’ve started adding additional line which invites people to click further into the wiki. Yes, the image does link to a page. Another bain of wikis is images don’t necessarily link to pages but the image itself. The first part of this code is plain wiki code with simple link.
Check out what else is aired during this [http://www.animelondon.ca/wiki/index.php?title=Anime_Shows_-_Spring_2011 season].
The second part to get an image to act like a button which most people are use to on the web is thus.
[[Image:Spring2011.jpg|link=Anime_Shows_-_Spring_2011]]
It took a little doing to find that code but it works. Giving a visual marker even if it’s not clicked.
For us, the average bounce rate of 77.0% was a bit high. Not all of that was the wiki’s fault but it was a place to start. I put new code in the latest shows like the one above. The daily bounce rate climbed to over 80% but yesterday (Friday) a significate drop to 67.57% from 83.33% prior. While the pages effected were small fraction of the entire wiki, it was a good sign.
It will be interesting if this will turn the tide of new visitors into surfing more and more of the site. A WHOLE lot more work is needed all across with site for that. Still it’s a good sign. Considering now I have to put the line and button on hundreds into existing wiki pages. Maybe I should be trying to learn templates more than Google Analytics. Running a major website is a major pain but a major pay off.
Now if only those who offered their help would actually come through with their promises. That would surprise me more than a really low bounce rates.
