Your ‘about’ page is important

Posted Saturday, June 30, 2007 at 2:02pm in Blogging |

Here’s a bit of a sweeping statement. Although overlooked by many, your blog’s ‘about’ page is one of the single most important aspects of your blog. Why? Well, because it allows you to tell anyone and everyone exactly who you are, what you do, where you work, where you live, what your interests are, the blog’s topic and a whole host of other aspects that define you as person that a visitor to your blog could potentially connect with. There have been countless times I’ve landed on a blog and tried to find out more about the person behind it with very little success. More often than not, I haven’t subscribed.

Sure, once you’ve developed relationships through social media then your about page doesn’t really matter to your online mates and contacts. They know you and may have met you in the real world. Probably read your blog too. However, your about page could be the deciding factor for people you don’t know yet to connect with you or not.

Let me give you this example. Here’s the content overview screengrab taken from the Google Analytics report of this very humble blog. Note: This was taken over the last three weeks period.

Yep, I know, the traffic’s nothing to write home about. Take a look at the about page though. It’s the second most visited page over the last three weeks. Pretty important don’t you think? It’s not just a once off either. This is the same content overview but with the date ranges applied for the last nine months.

Again, if we go back to the three week period and drill down into the data for the about page it gives some interesting facts.

Looking at the screengrab, my Google Analytics account tells me that I’ve had 401 unique visitors to the about page in the last three week period. Unique visitors meaning people who have never been on this blog before, meaning 401 different people I could potentially connect with. That’s quite a lot. Also, the average time on this particular page is over one hundred seconds on average, so they’ve obviously had to read what I’ve got to say.

Okay, when I get to the Bounce Rate I’m a little confused. Maybe Kev Price or the lads from Distilled can help? From my understanding, the Bounce Rate is the percentage of people who leave your blog/site completely after viewing that particular page. So once they land on it, they bounce right back of it (I think).

At first, I thought a 50% rate was pretty decent. Not so. A quote by Google Analytics evangelist, Avinash Kaushik, says that I should be worried. Crikey! I guess I need to improve on my own about page.

So, what should you include in your about page? Entirely up to you I guess. Antony Mayfield has a list of short one liners. So does Simon Collister. Ged Caroll, however, goes more indepth and covers a lot of his personal background whereas Matt Brett describes it through a narrative. Hugh MacLeod takes it further with words and pictures.

So whatever you decide to do with your about page, make it visible for visitors and, above all else, don’t neglect it.

SM milestone: Oldest blog turns 10 03.18.
Cheap christmas shopping 11.06.
BBC's link love 06.17.
Global PR Blog Week 3.0 - Brits required 10.10.
List of UK PR student bloggers 03.13.

Next post: « Loving links
Previous post: The UK social media scene »

10 Comments

Will Critchlow

Saturday, June 30, 2007 at 3:33pm

You’re pretty close with your definition of bounce rate but you need to be careful not to confuse it with exit rate.

Bounce rate is the proportion of visitors who enter on that page and leave straight away without going anywhere else on your site.

Exit rate is the proportion of people who view that page who leave your site afterwards (so this includes people who have come from elsewhere on your site). Exit rate is often less useful as there are pages where the most logical thing to do is exit (e.g. a contact page - once they’ve found your phone number of email address, they’re done).

Bounce rate can be a good metric for finding underperforming pages (I see you’ve already found Avinash’s blog - in particular, it’s worth checking out his post about Google Analytics’ comparison to site average visualisation - very handy for finding outliers.

I read his comment about good levels of bounce rates as well and found many of our pages performing more like 50% as you have found - so I think it’s something to aim for rather than a hard and fast rule that the page sucks…

Stephen

Saturday, June 30, 2007 at 4:24pm

Interesting. Thanks, Will.

So does that mean I should take exit rate into account also? Since they’re the people who have viewed my blog’s other content but have decided to leave after viewing my about page? Or am I just reading into it too much?

Thanks for the link. He’s definitely got a point there. Visual data is much easier to understand and digest for a left brain thinker. Ahem, or a dumb SEO ass like me.

Saturday, June 30, 2007 at 4:36pm

Hmmm. Yes, that is what the exit rate means - but you can’t really distinguish between people who subscribe to your blog but then decide to go and find out a bit more about you (and then leave satisfied, having found what they want) and people who are disappointed by your about page.

I think the bounce rate metric is probably more useful in this particular case - for example, if you didn’t have a list of recent or popular articles on your about page, then adding one would be a good way of engaging people who landed there.

Also remember that metrics in isolation are less useful than comparisons against an average for your site. The main thing is to draw meaningful comparisons between pages to understand their performance relative to each other. If most people visit your site from their feed reader for example, they may only read that one post then leave again (knowing that others will show up in the feed reader) so you could actually have a higher bounce rate than a site that didn’t have RSS, even though RSS is clearly a good thing…

Basically - use all the information available, but don’t stress too much over one particular metric…

Satish Talim

Sunday, July 1, 2007 at 2:46am

Avinash has an informative article on Bounce Rate - Bounce Rate: Sexiest Web Metric Ever?

Simon Collister

Monday, July 2, 2007 at 8:59am

Good post, Stephen. Interestingly, I’ve been meaning to sort out my about page now that Typepad offers a Wordpress-style stand-alone, static page.

Kev price

Monday, July 2, 2007 at 10:51am

Hey Stephen,

I think the other comments have pretty much got bounce rate covered.

I think analysing the reasons why people are bouncing froma page can pay huge dividends.
Using analytics you can see how they found the page and decide what they were actually looking for when they found your page. Did your page meet their expectations and needs? if not, then you are probably targeting the wrong keywords on that page.

If you are meeting their needs then maybe there is not enough affordance given to other areas of the site in order to drive them to explore.

A point on the about page itself:

About pages can be a good place on which toput your contact details.
Having contact details on a site is a nother metric of trust in Google’s eyes.

Monday, July 2, 2007 at 10:59am

“Having contact details on a site is a nother metric of trust in Google’s eyes.”

Really? Google actually trusts a site more if it has a contacts page?

Interesting.

Monday, July 2, 2007 at 1:34pm

“Really? Google actually trusts a site more if it has a contacts page?”

Yep - particularly if you are running PPC adverts (AdWords) - not that you would be for prblogger, but in general.