You can spend a lot of time creating content so that your listeners and website visitor stay informed. This great content helps with search engine optimization as well. But what if there were evidence that many of your visitors are not finishing the articles you publish? Would you still take the time to create extensive news articles and blog content and if so, would you feel bad about dedicating large amounts of resources to that content that you knew wasn’t being read?

A few years ago, Chartbeat and Slate.com published a research piece that analyzed how much people actually read through entire articles as well as some of the other actions they take before leaving your site. Here’s what their research showed…

10 Percent of Readers Won’t Scroll at all: While data shows that most readers scroll through about 60 percent of articles, as much as 10 percent are not scrolling at all. This data does not include people who bounce (get to the page and immediately leave). These people spend a very small amount of time reading the first few sentences to get the gist without scrolling.

Only 60 Percent of Articles are read by most people: There is a good chance that only 60 percent of your articles are getting read to the median scroll depth. This indicates that readers are not staying interested in articles long enough to get the meat and potatoes or the conclusion. 

Even people who don’t finish articles are sharing them socially: The Chartbeat data examined the percentage of people who scrolled through the article against the overall amount of tweets to those articles and found that people are sharing articles even before they finish reading them. Chartbeat’s data cannot tell the relationship between when the articles were shared (retweeted) compared to where exactly on the page visitors were but was able to show evidence that many people were sharing before they got close to the end of articles. 

65.7 percent of readers spend time below-the-fold: The “fold” is the bottom of the page once it’s loaded. Think of the place where you have to scroll any to see it. Chartbeat says that higher-quality content causes people to scroll further, indicating that all is not lost for quality content producers.

The takeaways: The data in this research shows some very sad and yet some very promising information on how users engage with our content.  We lose 10 percent of visitors before they have any time to interact with our content and the majority of readers, 60 percent, only have the capacity to make it to the median length of our content.  It was revealed that a lot of readers see the majority of content on photos and videos indicating that these visual elements are very helpful content pieces and should be used aggressively. In other words, have a good photo to go with every article.  

Do a little research of your own with Facebook and Google Analytics to see what content works better for your audience and try to do more of that.

Have a great week making your radio station website better!  Reach out to us if you need help at https://www.skyrocketradio.com.