Who doesn’t love a quick reward?
Putting gamification elements on your website can help you attract visitors. What’s more, once they are there, it can help you keep viewers on your site – which is a big deal to keeping your audience engaged on your platform and increasing your SEO ranking.
Gamification has become a popular trend for websites and apps, and for good reason. Interactive experiences are more immersive to your audience. And an interested audience translates to more subscribers or paying customers.
In this blog, we are going to dive into what gamification is, explain more about the benefits, and give some ideas of what you could include on your site to increase traffic.
Let’s start here:
What is Gamification?
Gamification refers to incorporating gaming features (badges, rewards, tasks, etc) to make a user experience more fun and interactive. Essentially, you turn something into a contest or game to get your audience hooked with the promise of rewards for participation.
Some examples of website gamification elements – which we discuss in more detail below – are:
- Spinning a wheel for exclusive rewards
- Tallying scores or “completeness” of tasks
- Running a contest
- Trivia games with leaderboards
- An in-website game
What are the Benefits of Gamification?
Adding gamification to your website can make the user experience much better and give you big returns in terms of engagement, revenue opportunities and SEO.
Boosting SEO
Driving visitors to your site through contests increases website views. And when visitors to your site participate in gaming elements, chances are that they will stay longer and not bounce off the page. These are all stats that help with SEO and get your website found easier.
Data collection
When you have users enter information to participate such as name and email, that is now valuable information and first party data that you can use to reach your audience and help build a picture of what’s working.
Increased engagement
Gamification delivers a better user experience, which leads to a more engaged and excited audience. If you manage to excite someone and get them thinking, that person is more likely to be repeat visitor and have a good impression of your brand.
Educate and entertain
Gamification is a great way to educate your audience without boring them in the process. Maybe it’s interactive trivia that relates back to your product or services, or user rewards for visiting certain education portions of your site or completing a task like downloading content.
Increase revenue
Selling sponsorship of a quiz or a game on your website is a simple way to gain a new revenue stream. Consider selling ad space to local or relevant businesses who want eyes on their brand. It’s a win-win because they will likely also help drive traffic to your website by pointing their audience there. Local advertisers can also offer prizes to the winner and runner-up of a Trivia Quiz contest.
Gamification Ideas to Help Increase Web Traffic
So, how to put gamification into use? Here are a few ideas!
Idea #1: Spin the Wheel
If you have ever been to a tradeshow or a festival with vendors, you know there is something fun about spinning a prize wheel. You can recreate that feeling by adding a “wheel” to your site where users click to spin and get a reward of some sort. Maybe it’s a discount, or a free eBook download. Be creative!
Idea #2: Add Badges/Points/Completeness Meter
People like to know where in the process they are. If you want your users to take two or more actions on your site, consider putting up a “completeness” meter on your site or rewarding actions with badges or points. If they take those actions – filling out a profile, downloading content, etc – they see a visual representation of how far they have come, and how much more they need to do to be “done”.
Idea #3: Run an Offline to Online Contest
How to get people from offline to your site? Run an interactive contest via QR code that has a landing page on your site. Maybe it’s a photo contest, or a trivia game with prize, where users have to complete an action on the site to enter.
Idea #4: An Actual Game
Flashback to the early 2000s internet – remember flash games? Consider giving users a nostalgic boost and spend some development money on a fun, easy game or app that somehow ties back to your product or service. For example, let’s say you sell high end binoculars. Develop a simple “identify the bird” game that will keep users entertained. If they “win”, offer a small discount.
Idea #5: Trivia pop up with prize
Who doesn’t like trivia? Do a “pop quiz” style trivia game on your site and make the questions relevant to your business. Plus, if the winners get any sort of prize, you engage the “reciprocity” principle – give them something, they’ll want to give you something back. Like their attention, or a name and email!
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These are just a few ideas on how to incorporate gamification onto your website in order to drive site traffic and help your SEO. Hope this was helpful! Digital Joy Engage Plus now includes gamification features which can enhance audience engagement even more.
