Recirculation is a metric that indicates the percentage of visitors who didn’t leave the website after visiting a specific page.
Recirculation, along with pageviews and time spent on page, reflects how well your content strategy works in general. All together, these metrics can help you identify whether your content marketing budget is well-spent or not.
Recirculation identifies whether readers proceed reading your materials after interaction or prefer to leave.
Is it the same as the bounce rate in Google Analytics?
Recirculation metric is not the same as the bounce rate. The latter shows how many visitors left the first page without any interaction. If a user performs any action on the first page before leaving (unless, this action is tracked as “non-interaction”) – it won’t count as “bounce.”
Recirculation is related to only transitions between pages and is not limited to just the first page in the session.
Why does recirculation matter?
Good recirculation increases session depth (or session length) — the number of pages visited per session. The higher the number, the greater your chance to:
- Lead visitors to the conversion page
- Turn new visitors into returning visitors (if they like their first experience, chances are they’ll return)
- Make your content and its package high-quality so users will come back to read it every day.
A good recirculation strategy frames your engaging content in a system that allows visitors to explore your website deeper without losing interest throughout the way.
How to develop a recirculation strategy?
Recirculation strategy is not the same for everyone. It depends on your niche and traffic sources. But there are some universal rules to adapt:
- Think “links.” The worst thing you can do to your recirculation is to fail including any inbound links in your articles. Even if you don’t have a concrete content strategy yet, inserting cross-links that are logical progression of a story – is the least you can do for your recirculation strategy at the initial point.
- Include “read also” section. Apart from cross-links that glue the parts of one story, make “read also” articles a part of your recirculation strategy. Being related to the subject, they are not direct progression of your first story.
- Use scrolling maps. Inspect a scrolling map to see how many visitors make it to the end of the article and where they dropped. Place your cross-links in the section that “hosts” most visitors.
- See where readers go next. Check which pages readers visited next after reading your first article (you can do it in the IO dashboards) and include them in the “read also” section.
- Spot the most engaging articles that lead to nowhere. As you write more and more content, best performers eventually appear. Consider turning them into your “pillar content” – the top of the content pyramid from where your readers “descend” down the loyalty journey.
- Track & adjust. Monitor your recirculation number regularly with your team and run more experiments. Make small improvements every day and monitor results.