Visitor Engagement: How to increase page views per visit (and data to prove it)

Feb23

If you own, maintain or contribute to a website, page views per visit is a metric you should be keeping an eye on. Unless you’re monetizing site impressions it’s probably not your core focus, but should certainly play a role as a key performance indicator (KPI) in your monthly reports.

After all, the more pages a visitor visits, the more engaged they are with what you’re saying.

Increase page views per visitTrouble is, the average internet user these days has the attention span of a goldfish.

There’s a reason why apps like Vine and Snapchat have become so popular – people lose interest very quickly, and are becoming increasingly harder to engage for any extended period of time.

So how do you keep users engaged with your content, and increase page views per visit?

Here are three simple ways we’ve successfully increased page views per visit in the past, along with some data to prove they’re tactics that can work for you too.

Take a look, and add your own thoughts in the comments below:

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Marketing secrets of the leading 25 nonprofits

Aug17

I discovered the 2016 M+R Benchmarks Study last week. It looks at a broad range of marketing data from participating nonprofits, such as email messaging, email list size, fundraising, online advocacy, web traffic, Facebook, Twitter, and mobile programs.

The findings of this study are fascinating. It’s concise and easy-to-understand (you can download it for free here), and offers great insight on what today’s nonprofits are doing when it comes to digital marketing.

My favorite section is when it transitions from discussing average benchmarks and explores the exceptional. What are the best of the best doing to drive fundraising and engagement through their marketing?

For the purposes of this analysis, they look at the 25 organizations with the largest year-over-year growth in total dollars raised online and assessed what makes their marketing strategy so effective. Let’s dig in…

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3 wildly success nonprofit marketing campaigns that drove massive impact with no budget

May24

In our small – but growing (join us!) – private Facebook group for socially-good marketers, we often discuss successful nonprofit marketing campaigns.

Particularly, those with a little-to-no budget.

Seeing how others drive massive impact with minimal resources is something we can all learn from, and take back to our own organizations and marketing campaigns.

We’ve had a few pretty incredible examples referenced recently, worth highlighting outside of our private group. Laid out below are three wildly successful nonprofit marketing campaigns that drove massive impact with no (media or advertising) budget – and what we can learn from them.

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Five insanely powerful – yet simple – Facebook advertising audiences

May02

Facebook’s advertising platform offers insane targeting, with thousands of possible ad targeting parameters. In order to properly test a particular audience you need a certain level of ad spend, though, and the average advertiser simply doesn’t have the budget to test a huge number of audiences right off the bat.

Fortunately, retargeting and remarketing tactics mean that there’s almost always low-hanging fruit, allowing you to generate ROI from day one. Once you get this solid foundation and consistent traction, it’s a lot easier to avoid wasted budget as you scale.

Just one glance at the Facebook ad audience dashboard can be overwhelming for new advertisers…

Facebook ad targeting

I’ll be the first to admit, I’ve experienced a lot of failed targeting. We all have. I’ve also identified, however, a few core audiences that I know are HIGHLY likely to provide ROI from day one.These audiences tap into retargeting (displaying ads to users who have visited your website) and remarketing (displaying ads to users whose email address you already have), which means that you’ll need an audience already – customers, email subscribers, Facebook fans, and/or website traffic – to make use of the methods below.

The following five audiences are ones I set up at the start of every advertising campaign I run, without fail. Data from these allow me to then scale the campaigns in an effective and affordable way.

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Automate your impact with this simple inbound growth funnel

Apr19

Inbound growth refers to the use of content and paid campaigns to grow a user base, and driving the users to take action. Part of the same family as growth hacking and inbound marketing, this process uses a couple of specific marketing strategies to push users through a funnel to reach a particular goal.

Once advanced, this process can take place in an almost entirely automated system. You can automate, and therefore scale, your impact. That’s why all brands – nonprofit, for-profit, or somewhere in between – should consider how it can play a role in their marketing efforts.

Here’s the standard marketing process on which inbound growth is built:

Inbound Growth Process

In inbound growth, we prioritize email marketing and retargeting/remarketing (advertising served to people who have already visited your website or are a contact in your database) to build, segment, and message our target audience(s).

Essentially, the goal is to build a community of website visitors and email subscribers, and use email and retargeting/remarketing to convert these prospects. Let’s take a look at a basic funnel:

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