I ran a brief experiment on my single ‘piece’ page this week. I used the news coverage on the Brooklyn Bridge White Flag incident as a catalyst topic. I created a quick location page for the Brooklyn Bridge, a ‘piece’ page for the White Flag, and a ‘artist’ page for the unknown group. I added an image, tagged the address, and put together the page. It looked like this:
I noticed the Brooklyn Bridge White Flag topic trending in the /r/nyc group. I noticed after a Google search that many news outlets were writing articles on the topic. I gathered the links and submitted them as individual “comments” to the post. This is a bit of an experiment to see whether having the press coverage on a piece is valuable. I dont actually have a function for this, so the test method is the comment submission.
After a day, the reception to the link was positive. No one commented on the Brooklyn Bridge White Flag page and no one commented on the Reddit submission link. Currently, the Reddit posting has a 86% upvote rating with 7 votes
Google Analytics shows the traffic shows me that I had 159 visitors as of two days ago. About 50 visits are a result of the Reddit posting. Im surprised to see that the page views of visitors is reflective of a ‘exploring’ visitor. The bounce rate of people coming to the Brooklyn Bridge White Flag page is high, but this is normal for Reddit links.
The pages viewed on the day I posted the Brooklyn Bridge White Flag link shows that Brooklyn Bridge White Flag page viewers did view multiple pages. Im surprised by the length of time the visitors stayed on the page. The average was 43 seconds, showing that users did read some of the page before leaving. There is very little content on the page, so this is a sign of interest.
Based on the on-site behavior, I gather people are interested in the service. Rather then having a high bounce rate (+80%), a number of people tried to visit other parts of the site. The highest trafficked page, after the Brooklyn Bridge White Flag page, was the graffiti index page. The best way to get to that page is the top navigation link or the back button at the end of the Brooklyn Bridge White Flag page. If the ‘back’ button was the driver, Im not sure if this is people trying to get back to Reddit, or whether they intended to go to the graffiti index page.
I could better track my pages to know the exact cause. For now, no one is registering and commenting. This is okay because the website is still error prone. I am refining this user flow. I’ll run an experiment to see if I can get visitors to register.