Image movement as a hook for getting more...

...pages viewed per unique visitor?

[borisbaloney]

I am looking to improve the coversion ratio from a visitor referred to the site by a search engine, to a user browsing multiple pages. In other words I would like to imporve my average page views per unique visitor that is currently about 1.9 pages per visitor, on a 35 page site of closely related information.

I suspect my site is lacking in the pages-per-user scale because I have attempted to make a simple to navigate, quick to download, site that doesn't have any complex flashy graphics. What I suspect is happening is that the lack of any movement on the site is causing it to appear boring, or even worse - amateur.

Do the webmasters here use moving graphics / flash as an essential "hook" to attract attention? Or is my attractive and fast loading, but motionless site the best way to go?

[bird]

If a site uses moving graphics without any useful purpose, then my first reflex is to leave, not to view more pages that will probably have a similar nuisance factor.

If your visitors leave "too soon" on a clearly structured site, then you're simply not offering them what they were looking for. You could try to analyse the keywords they searched on, and add content that fits their needs to keep them around.

[borisbaloney]

Thanks bird. There's no question that the visitors are getting the search result that they want, and that I am targeting, on my pages. The other potential reason for my low pages-viewed-per-unique score may be excessive text on the page.

I have loaded the page up with good on-topic text that may be a bit too confronting to the user. I have ~1000 words on the home page, but it is clearly marked with sub-headings to be readable / skimable.

Am I correct in saying that most sites can pull an average of 3-10 page views per unique visitor? As a matter of interest what are other people getting around here?

[dmorison]

What I suspect is happening is that the lack of any movement on the site is causing it to appear boring, or even worse - amateur.

you're simply not offering them what they were looking for

Are you sure it's not far more fundamental than that - they found exactly the information they were looking for on the landing page and now they're happy.

If you are satisfying their request in one page (the landing page from their query), then to entice them into the rest of your site you have to SELL it to them.

Unfortunately, people do not think:

"Hmmm, this looks like a nice professional site, I think i'll stay a while and have a look around."

If life were that simple we wouldn't be faced with supermarkets changing their shelf layouts every month!