What Is Website Gamification And How Can It Work For Your Website?

For us to understand website gamification, we have to first get the idea of gamification generally. Gamification involves using game techniques for things that don’t necessarily involve gaming so as to encourage engagement from people. Gamification in business is not a new trend, brick and mortar businesses have been using gamification for a long time. The little treats you get at Starbucks, McDonald’s, etc, giving you coupons, discounts, and freebies for your participation or doing anything that can be rewarded.
Online businesses discovered gamification in the last few years. Gamification for online businesses is used in different ways from web app gamification, mobile app gamification, website gamification and even social media gamification.

Website Gamification

The present internet users are made up of people who enjoy playing games and are reward-driven. To get their attention and have them interact with your website more, you have to offer them more than just your quality content. You have to make it stimulating for them and that’s why a lot of big brands now use website gamification and you too can do the same for your website.

Benefits Of Website Gamification

The major benefit of website gamification is to encourage engagement and have your audience interact with your website and your website community. In relation to this, you will also get users to spend more time on your website and that will automatically improve your bounce rate. Of course, you know how important it is for your website to have a low bounce rate.
Website gamification can lead to increased traffic. For instance, rewarding users for sharing your website articles on their social media will inspire them to share your articles more. By doing so, your website will reach more people and some of them will click on your website.
One other benefits of website gamification that should not be overlooked is SERPs ranking. Once your website starts generating higher traffic with a lower bounce rate, Google will start taking your website more seriously. As a result, your website will gradually score higher for domain authority (DA).

How Does Website Gamification Work

The word ”gamification” can be confusing for a lot of people new to the trend. Gamification does not mean using actual games to encourage engagement. Website gamification as well doesn’t involve using actual games but the style of gaming – the design, the pictorial representation, the conditions, wins and losses, points and levels, and statuses.

Points And Badges
So, let’s say you have a website that is focused on writing articles about SEO, you can reward your audience in various ways. You can give loyalty badges to regular commenters and score the number of comments by giving them points. Give a different badge to users for sharing the articles on their social media, and also score the number of shares by giving them points. When a user reaches a certain number of points, the badge will change to a different one; you can give the user a bronze badge for 10 comments. When the same user has made up to 25 comments, you change the badge to a silver badge.

Levels and Ranks
Add levels to make it more interesting. In this case, there will be a hierarchy of users which will be competitive because users will want to get superiority badges and top the rank as the most interactive user or whatever name you choose to give it.

Quizzes
Another way to use website gamification is by doing quizzes regularly on your website, quizzes about what your website is about or your teachings or the information in your articles. Anything related to your line of business that can be made into quizzes. Buzzfeed does the regular quizzes and it has surely contributed to the growth of Buzzfeed. You can name some users ”Trusted” because of how well they score on the quizzes. This will make them feel good about themselves because it means that whenever they comment on an article, people will get to take their word as authority.

Tangible Rewards
Points, badges, levels don’t mean anything if they can’t be useful to the users. Upon reaching a number of points, let users be able to win freebies, coupons, discounts, ebooks, anything that your audience will find rewarding.

Note that it is not all businesses that need website gamification, so before you adopt website gamification, review your business, your website to see how website gamification can improve your website engagement and business overall.