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