Glossary

Recirculation Rate

What is recirculation rate?

Recirculation rate measures the percentage of users who click to another piece of content after viewing a particular post on your site. It helps you identify which pieces of content are most effective at driving traffic to other posts.

If you’re looking to improve your site’s engagement and keep readers coming back, understanding recirculation rate is key.

How is recirculation rate calculated?

Recirculation rate is the percentage of views that went to another internal page of your site from a particular page or post. The formula is:

(Referred Next Views / Total Page Views ) * 100

Recirculation rate versus bounce rate

You can think of recirculation rate as the opposite of bounce rate—and more meaningful for understanding content quality. While bounce rate measure how often people leave your site, recirculation rate measures how many people stay after consuming your content.

Bounce rate is less useful as a measure of content quality because it often has less to do with the content itself and more to do with user experience, site design, or load time.

Recirculation rate is a stronger measure of content quality because it highlights the clear positive impact of your content, not the fuzzy negative impact bounce rate highlights. High recirculation rate indicates that your content is engaging enough for users to be willing to make another click on your site and stick around to learn more.

Why is Recirculation Rate important?

Attracting new readers is the first step in the content journey, and the second (and many times the most difficult to measure) is keeping them engaged and coming back for more. Recirculation rate makes it easier to assess the effectiveness of your content at this middle stage of the content strategy funnel.

With the ability to measure recirculation rate in your tool belt, you’ll have the metrics you need to track and optimize your top-, middle-, and bottom-of-funnel content.

  1. Top of Funnel Metrics: Page Views, New Visitors, Search Referrals, Social Referrals, Social Interactions, Referrals/Interaction 
  2. Middle of Funnel Metrics: Page Views, Returning Visitors, Recirculation Rate, Device Views, Total Engaged Minutes, Average Engaged Minutes 
  3. Bottom of Funnel Metrics: Conversions

If you are looking to improve your content strategy and increase the ROI from your content, you need to understand which types of content move each of these groups of metrics. Then you can design a content experience that truly resonates with your audience and drives results for your team.

What can you do with Recirculation Rate?

Here, we’ve collected some example decisions you can make using recirculation rate. 

  • Post A has high traffic but low engaged time and recirculation rate. You’re not targeting the right audience. Promote the content through different channels and see if engagement and recirculation improve.
  • Post B has high traffic and engaged time but low recirculation rate. There might not be sufficient relevant links to click on within the post. Or the post could be too long or poorly written.
  • Post C has average traffic with high engaged time and recirculation rate. Get this post in front of more readers and see if the rates hold up.

Questions about recirculation rate? Send an email to our product team at research@parsely.com.