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Article Writing & Marketing Insights

Your URL Clicks Divided By Total Articles

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What are your total URL Clicks received divided by the total live articles in your account?

This percentage would show you how much traffic your articles are generating on average, each…or would they?

First, feel free to comment on this blog entry and share what yours is… but let’s take a closer look at the 8 ways this CTR (Click Through Rate) number can be skewed or perhaps not as important as you may think.

It’s not accurate because LENGTH OF TIME is a variable we currently don’t provide - ie: monthly cut-off data.
It’s only partially in your control. You can only optimize so far and then you’re at the mercy of market interest.
It doesn’t factor in how much traffic your EzineArticles generate from sites and ezines that syndicate your content. This is a major factor for most.
Forget about scoring a high CTR percentage. Consider for a moment the URL Clicks CTR compared to your total article views… What would you rather have: 1000 article page views and 50 clicks (5% CTR) or 7000 article views and 210 clicks (3% CTR)? Me? I’d go for the lower CTR and higher total clicks delivered!
Different niches provide different CTR by nature.
Instead, analyze ALL of your articles and look for individual article patterns to see if you can draw actionable conclusions as to what type of content matched with what type of compelling resource box offer creates the best overall desired performance. ABT! (Always Be Testing!)
Never lose site of the most important user: Your reader! They can sense ‘thin’ content in a few milliseconds…and they are gone. Obsess over your readers and the URL clicks will take care of itself.
Worry less about scoring big numbers with a handful or articles and instead focus on covering your niche expertise in greater article volume & depth. Too many members focus a core chunk of their energy on over-optimizing existing content when they could focus the same energy on expanding their article inventory.

Your Thoughts?

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on May 8, 2008 at 3:46 pm

Views 238 |

9 Comments »

Alejandro Guevara Onofre writes:

I am a member of EzinesArticles since March 2007 …I’m very happy! I began to write as hooby … not with commercial purposes (I was looking an American website to write about Cuba’s dictator Fidel Castro Ruz). One proof of this is that I have no personal and business websites (not personal/ commercial blogs). I do not have Platinum status. I have 1 click, 108 votes (no friends or family), 2 comments and views 104,800 (13 months/ 81 articles) … 10 articles in the top 15 (Olympic category) … several top positions (education,Olympics, politics 2007/2008). By my results, I think that I will publish books about countries, politics,Miss Universe pageant, sports, but in English (for the first time). There are interesting proposals!…I have six books (Spanish).
Many thanks
Alejandro

Comment provided May 8, 2008 at 6:18 pm

David Maillie writes:

Actually click throughs don’t count for much as they are quite misleading because many of those clicks can be robots, serps, Google, etc… It is best to use a widget or plugin on your website so you can determine exactly where people are coming from and most importantly how many unique, non robot page views you get. Uniques are what give you sales and quantifiable numbers.

I would still say it is best to write less and focus more on quality and giving the best info, answer, etc… possible to your audience. Too many authors here write tons of thin or just complete junk articles. As an example upon searching under fuel economy in Ezinearticles we find 100’s of articles on Browns gas, water to gas, run your car on water, etc… I would say from looking through them 99% are rewrites of each other and most are very poorly written, have no real info and serve the reader very little use. Many of these will be destined for the Google supplemental index (kind of like the sandbox).

Just like with Google, could you imagine how nice it would be on Ezinarticles if you didn’t have to weed through 99% crap articles, worthless sales pitches, junk rewrites and so on to find what you really want and are looking for? This might be part of the reason why since last year the Google algorithm discredits almost all links from ezines. They consider them possible link farms. Just ask Matt Cutts at Google. Now, that doesn’t mean you won’t get traffic, you just won’t get much through Google which is the majority of all internet search traffic.

As Chris said above, focus on giving the reader what they want and need and then the readers will give you what you want in return - sales, links, traffic, sign ups, whatever.

David Maillie

Comment provided May 9, 2008 at 1:34 am

Douglas Fanning writes:

I found this article very intresting and true give the reader what he would like how to increase traffic and ways of doing so

Comment provided May 9, 2008 at 4:47 am

Christopher M. Knight writes:

David,

We built our URL Click Tracking reporting with anti-click-fraud in mind. It’s specifically takes all bots, good or evil, into consideration and excludes all non-human clicks.

Comment provided May 9, 2008 at 6:53 pm

David Kingman writes:

I find articles of some niches tend to get lesser traffic than other niches, indirectly pushing down the number of CT that an article gets.

Anyway, as this article explained, saturating a niche with a large article inventory will eventually get “all” the traffic that a niche gets here.

Comment provided May 11, 2008 at 9:24 am

Angela Booth writes:

Amen to that. Random click throughs are as meaningless as high volumes of traffic which doesn’t convert.

Forget click throughs. Are you getting RESULTS with your article marketing?

If you are, carry on. If you’re not, check the quality and volume of your articles. :-)

Cheers

Angela

Comment provided May 11, 2008 at 8:55 pm

John R writes:

I have to say that the click through rate and traffic that my site analytics says I get from Ezine is quite healthy, better than most other article directories. I would estimate that the traffic I get from the syndicated articles is pretty minimal, though, like 100x less that than Ezine articles.

As for click through rate, something in the teens is closer to acceptable. 5% is not that great, I average a lot better. And the conversions I see on Ezine traffic is as good as the organic search traffic, but it is a function of the presell you do.

Comment provided May 12, 2008 at 4:35 pm

Christopher M. Knight writes:

John,

Glad to hear!

I wished more of our members watched or knew their own site analytics. :)

@angee,

I agree!

David,

Great point. Too many members try to achieve big results with too small of an article inventory.

Comment provided May 12, 2008 at 8:46 pm

Lance Winslow writes:

Ah ha, “you do the math” because Now YOU know the secret forumla, thank you for that. - Lance

Comment provided May 14, 2008 at 10:38 pm