Yes that is not just a catchy subject line.
WhyDoWork gets about 1,000 new members a month (a little slower lately because our redesign has had some impacts on pages indexed) but its been fairly consistent to a point where were at around 27,000 members.
During peak times of the year, subscribers are at around 50 new members a day.
Quite a ways back in the infancy of WhyDoWork.com we were using a basic webstats application that told us little else other than the number of users per day visiting the site. Once we upgraded to Google Analytics, we were able to literally double our daily subscribers overnight by looking at one factor:
TOP EXIT POINTS
If you already have Google Analytics, you’ll see it after you click the “Content” menu. Then click “Top Content”. You should see something like this (click to view larger):
In the image above from right to left, we’re taking a look at a months worth of stats, what the top content for the month was, how long users spent on each page, the bounce rate, the exit rate, and the cleverly blurred out $ index of our goals.I’ve highlighted in pink the key areas to look at:
- What is your sites average Exit %?
- Out of your top content, which are the few that stand out as high exit points in the (% Exit column)?
The last step is to take action.
In our case, we strategically placed content inviting users to sign up, or register free prior to viewing in order to take advantage of high traffic but poor site stickiness.
On the days following the implementation of this idea, avg. daily subscribers rose from around 20 to over 40.
Give it a try. I’m fairly new to blogging and usually hesitant to give away secrets of the site, but this is too beneficial to be kept a secret 
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I never thought of using my stats in this way, although I do use a script to see where on the page people scrolled to before they left.
It is important to keep stats and make changes in order to improve them.
thanks to share your thoughts.
Wow!! Some “internet gurus” would charge hundreds for this info.Thanks for the insight.
That is an amazing strategy. I am heading off to do that right now!
Isn’t this the whole point o Analytics , to analyze data.
Thanks for these analytics basics. I have struggled with what to do with the data in order to improve the site.
When you state “we strategically placed content inviting users to sign up, or register free prior to viewing” are you talking about placing content on the high traffic page that has a high exit rate or are you loading a pop form that loads as the page is loading?
I hate pop-ups, just placing buttons etc. above the fold so it’s easy to see.
I hate too and mozilla doesnt catch all :/
Thanks for sharing this. I’ll look at Google Analytics to see what I can learn about the traffic on my blog.
are you talking about placing content on the high traffic page that has a high exit rate or are you loading a pop form that loads as the page is loading?…..
Nice trick. I did something similar and doubled the one Adsense channel’s exposures
. Actually I did two things, and I will explain them both in my website.
On the other hand, I’m glad that this post from 2007 was read today by me and the website owner still gives answers now in 2010 to the comments here
That’s very cool !
Great tips, Google Analytics is great, i like that it very detailed.
whosoever is familer with analytics has to be aware of that point ……. content needs much more fresh approch … somewhere it was decieveing for the viewer…..