When I say that 40% of your article goes directly to waste, I actually mean that most readers only get to about 60% of any article you write. As a content writer, you might experience that frustrating/annoying/what am I even writing for feeling. All of the above feelings are true for me, at least.
The Introduction
Slate.com recently asked Josh Schwartz, a data scientist at traffic analytics company Chartbeat, to analyze how readers engage with Slate’s articles. Schwartz also analyzed several other sites using Chartbeat. While the results aren’t entirely shocking, they are worth a closer look, especially if you’re a content writer.
How Far Do People Scroll?
This chart represents only the people who spent time on the page – excluding those who left immediately after landing on it. The reason the horizontal axis extends beyond 100% is that it includes elements that come after the article ends, like the comments section. Here are some interesting points… 10% of people don’t scroll through your article at all.
My guess is that they take a quick look at the headline and decide it’s not worth it. Or maybe they read a sentence or two of the introduction and aren’t really impressed. Oooo… maybe they’re distracted by all the bells and whistles near the top of the page – like CTAs or design clutter – feel overwhelmed or frustrated, and say goodbye. The lesson here is clear. You need to hook them right from the start. Write an exceptional blog title, lure them in with an engaging introduction, and give them the content right away. Otherwise, most visitors only get to 60% of the article.
This really raised my eyebrow at first. I’m surprised that most people reach this point. But do they actually read that first 60%, or are they just scrolling to see if there’s anything interesting that catches their attention, and then at the 60% mark they decide it’s not happening and leave? It’s hard to know, but that could very well be the case. To attract those readers who are scrolling quickly and reading what you’ve actually written, try breaking up your content with images, catchy headlines, bolded points, and highlighted text to spotlight any interesting details like statistics, quotes, or particularly engaging comments. This will help grab the attention of fast-scrolling readers, and hopefully, they’ll stick around to read.
Most Visitors Will Scroll Through an Entire Article with Images and Videos
Slate says that the 100% point on the chart is an exception resulting from pages containing images and videos. On these pages, they scroll through the entire page. This makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? Images and videos are generally more engaging. They are also easier and quicker to skim through (perhaps except for some longer videos). Should I mention the main point? Incorporate more images and graphics into your content, and you might see an increase in engagement.
Do People Tweet Before Reading?
The answer: Yes. It seems so.
Although Chartbeat can’t track when individual visitors tweet links to definitively say that people tweet before reading the entire article, it can take into account the total number of tweets to an article and compare it to the number of readers who fully scrolled through the article.
Essentially, what’s shown here is that there is a very weak relationship between how far a reader scrolls the page and tweeting: articles that get tweeted a lot aren’t necessarily read in full. Articles that are read in full don’t necessarily generate a lot of tweets.
How
Feeling disgruntled now, content writing colleagues? I, for example, am very far to the right on the spectrum “I’m very angry.” I can’t even tell you to write bad content because followers on Twitter will share anything with a headline that seems interesting. I’ll just tell you to keep creating high-quality content, write exceptional headlines (again), and head to gallery C. That’s all I can do.
Where do readers spend most of their time?
The final piece in Schwartz’s analysis was looking at where people spend their time on the page, using a heat map. Check it out… about two-thirds of the time people spend on the page is “below the fold.” “We generally see that high-quality content makes people scroll more,” says Schwartz. In other words, the more time below the fold, the better! It may be an indicator of content quality.
But beware, page design may mislead this data, especially if the page is designed in such a way that visitors have to scroll down after seeing large banners at the top, or CTAs, or large article headlines to see any part of the actual article. For sites where this is the case, interaction below the fold may seem very high. For pages that start their articles higher up on the page, interaction below the fold may not seem that impressive.
Was any of Schwartz’s discoveries surprising to you?
Source: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/most-people-arent-reading-to-the-end-of-your-posts
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