If you’ve been following my SimpleReach Slide case study you know I’ve been trying to get visitors to stay on my blog longer. The plugin is designed to alert visitors to other interesting content on the blog once they finish reading the current page.
When I first started using the plugin the statistics for my blog were as follows.
- Average Time on Site: 00:01:48
- Bounce Rate: 67.62%
- Pages/Visit: 1.72
During the first three weeks of using the SimpleReach Slide plugin I was getting a steady increase in the time on site of visitors and the number of pages per visit of each visitor.
For some reason, during the last week of the case study the numbers decreased dramatically enough to affect the overall average over the four weeks of the case study. Here are the final numbers for the four weeks of running the plugin.
- Average Time on Site: 00:01:46
- Bounce Rate: %72.04
- Pages/Visit: 1.60
As you can see the numbers are worse than when I started using the plugin. I think the main reason for this is that my recent posts have generally been shorter. For example, the Free Shirt Friday posts are basically just photos and don’t take very long to read.
During the use of the plugin, one issue that I kept seeing was that the social sharing buttons were not getting displayed correctly. I’ve seen some other people mention this issue so it doesn’t seem to be specific to my setup.
In summary, I think the SimpleReach Slide plugin can help increase visitors stay on your site longer. You just need to make sure you have enough compelling content for your visitors to consume. I probably won’t continue to use the plugin however, due to the social sharing display issue.
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