The Importance of Knowing Your Readership’s View Time
For most enterprises, a key long-term aspect of the business is being able to change and adapt with the times. This is especially true in the world of technology, where any company invested in the tech industry needs to constantly be on their feet. Smart businesses have been early adaptors, from using typewriters to computers to tablets to cloud computing, and they will always look to contract services that provide the latest software and technology. Those who once turned to business DSL providers, for example, are increasingly turning to purveyors of DS3 internet.
For the webmaster, the rapid pace of change in this internet era requires much to keep track of. We can’t just be satisfied with maintaining our sites; instead, we need to constantly upgrade, improve, and retrofit it to best keep pace with current trends. In order to do this we must know what consumers want. Or, more importantly, we must know what our target audience wants.
This should come as no surprise to any webmaster, most of whom are always busy seeking out the latest SEO stats and conducting viewership surveys to gauge the interests and demographics of those who frequent their sites. Getting such information is crucial, but it should always be done in the context of one key piece of information: view time.
Understanding view time requires figuring out how much time, truly, your audience spends clicking through your site. For every website there are people who click onto the website, look at it for 4 seconds, and then leave. There are people who stay for several minutes but don’t click through any of the site’s internal links. And then there are people who may stay on the site for hours, reading every single piece of information and watching every video they can find.
Studying these actions – and drawing distinctions between different view times – is just as important as differentiating frequent viewers from occasional ones. After all, we want to treat each kind of viewer separately. For the 2 second reader, we want to use their demographic information to make the site more initially appealing. For the middle-of-the-road viewer, we’d like to give them some links they may find more appealing. And for the intensive viewer, we need to make sure that the site, ultimately, keeps their interests foremost in mind. No two readers are the same, and keeping this in mind can help us best keep pace with changing audience needs.