Ajay D’Souza who regularly writes on Weblog Tools Collection had recently updated a plugin called ‘Where did they go from here?‘. Originally developed by Mark Ghosh, this plugin keeps track of where your readers go after reading a post and displays this list at the end of your post. This works just like Amazon’s “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” feature on their product page.
I never noticed this plugin before and I’m quite surprised that I have missed it considering how useful it is.
What makes it special?
Now you might think that this is just another related posts plugin, but actually it is not. With related posts, you are using predetermined algorithms to pick related posts. With this plugin, you let your visitors’ behavior decide which posts are related.
Having a combination of both a related posts plugin and this “Where did they go from here?” plugin can go a long way towards reducing your visitor bounce rate. I have taken the dive and installed it on my blog. Installation and setup was extremely easy (most likely because of Ajay’s admin facelift). You can see in action it at the end of this post.
Minor drawback
Of course no software is perfect. The only thing I don’t like about the plugin is that upon initial activation, you will see something like “Readers who viewed this post also viewed: -N/A” for all of your posts. For a not so heavy traffic blog like mine, this will probably stay on some my post pages for a week or so depending on how popular they are. It would be a bit cleaner to not display the plugin text at all if there are no records of visitors from that post page.
Bottom line
Overall I am quite impressed with the plugin for its usefulness and ease of installation. I give it 5 stars and encourage you to check it out for yourself. The 5-minute installation can help you reduce your bounce rate dramatically.
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