Content Recirculation Strategies For Publishers
September 2024
#Content Recirculation
Keep your site’s pulse humming along by making your archives work for you, in this guide to content recirculation for publishers.
Engaging, entertaining content is the lifeblood of a publisher’s site. But blood doesn’t just go around your body once and consider its job done; blood circulates and recirculates. If your blood made the circuit only once before exiting, that’s bleeding and you should go see a doctor ASAP.
Similarly, if your content gets posted once and then vanishes into the depths of your archives, your site is bleeding — bleeding revenue. You want your content to keep paying dividends for your site months, even years after it was originally published. That way, you get an ever-expanding pile of passive income for your site, build a more-loyal audience, and more opportunities to display your advertisements.
That’s where “content recirculation” comes into play. Finding new ways to introduce old content to your readers helps you get the most out of your site — and while it’s not an exact science, there are several tried-and-tested ways of keeping things circulating.
In this blog post, we explain the ins and outs of content circulation, and how to boost those numbers starting today. Read on:
Table of Contents
Case Study: Maximizing Revenue: Insticator’s SSP is one of Aditude’s Top 5 Demand Partners — Read More.
What Is Recirculation?
We’ve gone over a lot of different site metrics on this blog, and every one of them measures something different, unique, and crucial. That being said, recirculation is one of the more-important ones. To put it simply, recirculation measures how entertaining, bingeable, and otherwise addictive your content is, by measuring how effectively your content prompts people to stay on your site reading more content. It’s sort of the anti-bounce rate: while bounce rate measures how many visitors leave your site after visiting only one page, recirculation measures how much retention and mileage your articles are generating.
This metric provides important insights into which content is engaging your audience, and allows you to refine your content strategy to ensure it’s pushing the right buttons. Insticator has developed several tools to help encourage content recirculation, as well as gather first-party data that you can use to refine your content strategy — we do this because a solid recirculation strategy can pay huge dividends for your site.
What Is Recirculation Rate?
There’s a formula you can use to determine what kind of recirculation rate your site is producing. With this formula, you can calculate how many users click through to additional pages after viewing an initial page.
It’s fairly simple:
(Referred Next Views / Total Page Views ) * 100
With this rate, you can pinpoint which content is driving further engagement. Higher recirculation rates indicate content that encourages readers to explore more, while a lower rate might suggest areas for improvement.
Insticator’s Report Builder feature on our Analytics Dashboard allows you to gather and tabulate this kind of data.
Recirculation Rate vs. Bounce Rate
As we said earlier, Bounce Rate and Recirculation Rate are connected, but opposite. While recirculation rate measures the effectiveness of content in driving further engagement, bounce rate tracks how many visitors leave after viewing just one page.
High circulation rates are a sign your content is compelling. High bounce rates might indicate your content isn’t compelling, but it’s not the only potential cause. Poor site design, loading times, too many intrusive ads, and other issues with your Core Web Vitals could all contribute to a high bounce rate.
If your bounce rate is high, you’ll want to conduct a site audit to rule out those sorts of mitigating factors. People may not be engaging with your content because your site is difficult to read, because it’s too noisy or cluttered, or a variety of other issues. The nice thing is, improving these aspects of basic functionality is always a good idea no matter what outcome you’re striving for, so it’s pretty much never wasted effort.
How to Improve Your Recirculation Rates
With a solid grasp of recirculation metrics, it’s time to explore effective strategies for improvement. Here are some key methods to boost your recirculation rates:
Build and Refresh Evergreen Content
One important way of building a stable of recirculate-able content is to focus some of your energy on so-called “evergreen” content. If your site mostly focuses on the latest news and updates, your old content is going to become more-dated and less-useful over time. That’s a lot of wasted effort and server space devoted to things nobody’s reading anymore.
Set aside a portion of your production schedule to evergreen content: information that isn’t changing rapidly, like biographical profiles of important figures in your vertical, explainers on how to perform tasks relevant to your audience, or frequently-searched questions that apply to your chosen topic. These are the sorts of articles that can be bookmarked by readers and returned to later — but, more importantly, they can be recommended reading in your on-site content recirculation widget that will never get stale.
That being said, evergreen content needs to be checked periodically to make sure it’s still up-to-date. Profiles of living people will accumulate new details. World records are broken. Scientific knowledge advances, and how-to-guides need to keep up with the latest life-hacks. Giving your evergreen content a pass once every quarter or so makes sure it’s still safe for consumption.
Recommending Related Content
One of the most effective ways to enhance recirculation is by offering readers additional content to explore. Much like streaming platforms suggest the next show to keep viewers hooked, you can implement content recommendation widgets to guide readers to related articles.
By strategically placing links to related content, you increase the chances of readers staying on your site longer. Insticator’s Spotlight feature allows you to showcase your best-performing articles or pages, boosting their visibility and encouraging readers to explore more. This can effectively increase recirculation and overall engagement.
Encourage Repeat Traffic with Newsletters
Newsletters are a powerful tool for driving repeat traffic and enhancing recirculation. With the decline in organic social media reach, newsletters offer a direct channel to keep your audience engaged and bring them back to your site.
Segmenting your newsletter content based on reader interests ensures relevance and boosts engagement. Analytics from email campaigns, such as open rates and click-through rates, provide insights to refine your approach and drive higher recirculation rates by identifying which headlines are driving clicks — and if they drive clicks in a newsletter, they’ll likely do the same in an on-page recommendation.
Insticator’s Email Sign-Up feature helps you build and manage a subscriber list effectively. Customize your sign-up cards to align with your brand, and track engagement through our Publisher Portal.
Engage Readers with Quizzes and Surveys
Interactive content, such as quizzes and surveys, can significantly boost engagement and recirculation. Inspired by the popularity of interactive quizzes, incorporating these elements into your content strategy can make the user experience more engaging.
Quizzes and surveys encourage active participation, making readers more likely to explore additional content. By aligning these interactive elements with your content, you can enhance user interaction and keep readers engaged.
Insticator’s Trivia feature allows you to have custom questions that engage your readers and test their knowledge, appearing natively on your page. You can also include content suggestions and email sign-up cards within the rotation, to build upon that user engagement in other ways.
Final Thoughts
In short, improving content recirculation is essential for maximizing user engagement. By implementing strategies like content recommendations, personalized newsletters, interactive quizzes, and tailored content, you can foster stronger connections with your audience and encourage longer visits.
If you’re ready to boost recirculation and engage your readers more effectively, Insticator has the tools you need. From interactive Polls and Trivia to advanced analytics and content Spotlights, our solutions are designed to help you stay ahead in the dynamic world of digital publishing. Contact us today to learn more about how we can support your content strategy and drive success.
Written by
Sean Kelly, Senior Content Writer
Sean Kelly is a Senior Content Specialist, St. Louis-based engagement expert with 20 years of experience in content writing, and 8 years in adtech.
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