How can a news site drive return visits? How do you make it a destination?
The obvious answer is to give users more compelling content.
Fortunately there’s a whole internet of compelling content. All you have to do is link to it.
Obviously, driving users to other sites is a bit controversial (despite it working pretty well for Facebook and Twitter).
So you want to do two things…
(1) You want to test it in a small low-risk way. This is simple, you only add a couple of external links to your site.
(2) You want a robust way to measure the impact. This isn’t too hard either. You AB test it (randomly show half your users the external links). For both groups you want to measure the number of return users (available in Omniture, segmented as required).
What are we waiting for?