AOL Reports Big AOL.com Growth; Could It Be the Massive Page Reloads?

AOL has put out a press release today which shows significant growth in usage and advertising engagement for the aol.com site today. The release notes, "Since the homepage redesign was launched in September 2008, advertising click-through rates on the primary 300 x 250 ad banner rose 30%, according to internal metrics…In addition, the redesign is driving stronger consumer usage: total unique visitors and average daily visitors each are up 13%, and total minutes grew by 29%, compared to one year ago, according to the November 2008 comScore Media Metrix Report."

Congrats to AOL on the big usage improvements. Back in July I noted that AOL changed their client app and would enjoy a huge increase in pageviews due to the change. I use aol.com currently to check my AOL mail and I find that the page "clicks" an unbelievable amount of times on each pageload. Does this have anything to do with the increased stats? Doubt it, but there is one interesting thing to note. When you enter/exit AOL mail, it forces a view back to aol.com. There’s no way (at least that I can find) to engage with AOL mail without being forced back to aol.com after you complete your business.

Naturally this wouldn’t directly impact advertising click-through rates, it would certainly affect unique visitor and daily visitor counts. It’s a smart move for AOL – force as many users as you can to see as many pages with ads as possible.