There are 3 Google services I use every day, all day. They are Google Search, Google Mail and Google Reader. Google Reader delivers the content from my favorite sites directly to me, all in one place. I don’t have to worry about remembering to visit every site I would like to visit every day. This saves me time and energy, but the thing it saves me the most is bandwidth. Saving bandwidth in this country is important because it costs so damn much.
Google Reader is web based feed reader. [what is a feed?]
So how does Google Reader effect pageviews?
It isn’t just Google Reader, it’s any feed aggregator that affects pageviews. I am disregarding AJAX and other technologies that make it harder to track pageviews, I am focusing on Google Reader and other feed aggregators.
If you think about it logically the more users that read the content from your site via Google Reader the less pageviews you will receive. So we end up with a dilemma, we want users to view content via feeds (otherwise we wouldn’t offer feeds) yet we still want them to browse around our site, read related articles and maybe even click on our cleverly placed ads. I have a few suggested solutions for this problem.
Increase click though rate from feeds.
I can think of 3 ways to increase click through rates from articles read via feeds.
- Showing only article summary.
Instead of the user being able to read the whole article they will only be able to read a short summary of it and if they are interested in reading the rest of the article they will have to click on a link which will bring them right to your site. However you do get those lazy users who don’t bother clicking through. - Linking to previous articles.
You should do this any way. Linking to previous related articles in your current article is beneficial because it encourages users to read previous articles and even search engines follow the links and crawl the pages more frequently allowing them to be indexed higher in search rankings. - Related articles in feed.
I have seen a lot of sites that display related articles at the end of an article or on the side menu. This is just as beneficial as the point above. What would be even better is if this was applied to feeds. At the end of each article a few related articles should be listed.
Generating income from your feeds.
There are so many sites out there that have some form of advertising on them. These however all rely on pageviews because it is common sense, the more pageviews the more chance of you receiving and income from advertising. Now that pageviews are decreasing due to feeds, how do we solve this?
- Feedvertising.
No, it’s not bad spelling. There is an actual term for advertising in your feeds. There are a few places that offer services that allow bloggers, webmasters and site owners to place adverts in their feeds and earn from them. I have seen a lot from Text Link Ads and I know Feedburner has some sort of feedvertising offering. Google Adsense are currently beta testing a feedvertising solution.
Here are some screen shots from Google Reader.
Tags: Advertising, feeds, feedvertising, google, rss, stats, traffic
Speaking as a site visitor and not as a publisher (I have talked about my take on truncated feeds on chilibean already), truncated feeds irk me because I use a feed reader to aggregate the content I subscribe to in one place. If I have to start opening new tabs or windows to see what the article is really about that kinda defeats the purpose of subscribing to feeds in the first place. I may as well open a couple sites and flip through the posts there. It saves me having to run the extra application.
On the other hand, if I come across a full post that interests me, I am likely to blog about it and will visit the site anyway for the porposes of my post.
Paul: As a visitor to a site or subscriber to a feed I cannot agree more with you. I now spend most of my time using Google Reader sifting through new articles and other pieces of content. I rarely click through unless the summary or beginning of the article really grabs me.