metricology

Consumerism Commentary is a long-running and well-reputed blog largely about personal finance. I’ve been analyzing their traffic and making recommendations, and at the beginning of September 2009, I suggested adding more links from outdated articles to their updated counterparts.

For example, this article about a $100 bonus for opening a Chase checking account was from January 2008, but was still attracting many visits. From June 2009 through August 2009, it was 3.3% of the landing pages, which is pretty high for an outdated article from a year and a half ago. Not surprisingly, the bounce rate was around 50%.

The problem is that even though that promotion had ended a long time ago, there were other similar Chase promotions, even ones that were featured on the same blog. So, in a nutshell, the plan I came up with was this:

1. Look at your top Landing Pages, focusing on the high Bounce Rates
2. Read the content of the article, see if it’s out of date
3. Search the site for updated content in the same vein
4. Add a link from the old to the new, make sure it’s clear and obvious

Consumerism Commentary has been running for over seven years, so it might seem like a daunting task to update all your old articles. But that’s the thing: you don’t need to update all of them, just the ones people are paying attention to.

Over the course of a couple hours, we added a little over 20 of these old-to-new links, and from September through November 2009, AdSense Revenue for the updated pages represented 3.5% of the total. Put another way, the site’s revenue is up 3.5% because of a handful of strategically-placed links.

If you don’t feel like you have the time to work up this strategy, or the skill to implement it, or to track it properly, I’ll be happy to help you. Send us a quick message and let’s talk about it.