Do you judge a book or magazine or by its cover? The old saying urges you not to. But with so many interesting publications to read, and with so little time, you can’t help being captivated by a great-looking cover. No doubt, the cover is of great importance as to whether you catch the reader’s interest, and whether they start reading the magazine. This is true for printed magazines, but it’s even more prevalent in the online world. The big difference: on the Web, you can quickly and easily measure how many eyeballs you’ve caught, and what share of those eyeballs you’ve engaged.
Expect low bounce rates on online magazines
The way to measure your readership level is indicated by what’s called the ‘bounce rate’. The bounce rate is defined as the percentage of readers “bouncing” off the first page of their visit. That means, if a reader enters your online magazine and exits without browsing more pages, that reader is measured as a ‘bounce’. A high bounce rate indicates irrelevancy or performance issues with your online publication, so you would like this rate to be as low as possible. In other words, a bouncing reader is someone who dumped your magazine by judging the content and look of its cover.
On an average business website, it is not unusual to see overall bounce rates of 40-50%. With an online magazine, it is much lower. In fact, when we recently analyzed the top 1,000 most read magazines published by Zmags’ customers, we found the average bounce rate as low as 20%. The main reason for this is the strong navigation tools that make an online magazine much easier to navigate.
Measure the engagement level of your content
Once the reader turns the first page of your digital publication, you’ve captured something really precious: the reader’s attention. But how long can you keep their interest? Just as with a printed magazine, readers will usually flip through a digital magazine in chronological order, and begin reading an article only if it captures their attention. If you provide great content, the reader will keep turning the pages. Provide boring content, and the reader will eventually drop off.
The read-through rate is a key metric that measures how engaging your content is throughout the pages. As the term itself indicates, the ‘read-through rate’ is a measuring point that tells you how many readers read all the pages in your online magazine. In our study mentioned above, we found that nearly 50% of readers read through the entire magazine. As noted before, 20% of readers drop off at the cover page, 5% exit between the first full spread and the second spread, and from there, the curve flattens out slightly.
How you can improve reader satisfaction
Ultimately, a low bounce rate and a high read-through rate certifies that your audience is satisfied with the content you are offering. Just the same, there is always room for improvement. When conducting the analysis of these 1000 online publications, we also examined what made a magazine ‘stickier’. We looked into use of Flash elements and links, and we also examined how the number of pages of an online magazine affected the bounce rate and read-through rates.
Read about the results in our new whitepaper, How to improve the effectiveness of your digital magazines, and discover simple, but effective ways that you can lower your bounce rates and better engage your readers.
