Use Website Stats to Build Online Community

Summary overview

In this article you will find discussion of:

• Strategies used by successful sites
• Building community
• Measuring community
• 'customer loyalty' - repeat visitors
• Visualizing your site as a brick & mortar store

• Learning from traffic patterns
• Content management based on traffic statistics

Building (and measuring) a community of visitors to your site

One secret of sites like Amazon, ebay, Hotmail / MSN, and Yahoo is 'customer loyalty', which means a community of returning visitors. These sites have generated trust.

To begin replicating this process for your own site, benchmark your traffic community.

It is helpful to visualize these people, and imagine them coming in & out of  your store.

Some sites we measure have a very good returning visitor ratio of 30-40%. This group of visitors is their customer client-base, the community. So, if a community has 100,000 members, over a given period of time, two months for example, then you have the population of a small city coming to your site and returning. This means that people are actively using the info in some way.

The useful aspect of this information could not be deduced from 'pageviews' alone, but is only interesting when the pageviews are correlated to unique visitors. This will tell you how many pages the average visitor looks at, for example.

There are road signs to tell you how a community is behaving. A community comprised of first-time visitors has few variables. All you know at this stage, for example, is that your campaign generates first-time visitors. Therefore the best investment is to try and build a community of returning visitors and study their behavior. We have a community at opentracker that returns on a regular basis. If this community starts to visit our site less frequently and for shorter periods of time, using less information, we will take a look at the indicators and evaluate why such changes are taking place.

Visualize your website as a store with real people coming in & out

Visualizing a store and actual humans is a good way to measure the performance of your site, and to try & visualize what people are actually doing in your store.

The trick here is to remember that the numbers are generated by people. Are these people doing what your site is designed for?

One statistic that can give you an idea of what people are doing is the list that tells you which pages are being looked at most. This tells you which part of your store is most popular. Imagine pages as shelves or sections of your store. Do you have 'staff' or help resources to help people make decisions?

The pages that are heavily trafficked should receive the most of your attention when you manage your content.

Keep in mind, also, that while certain pages do have a lot of pageviews, they are perhaps viewed by a minority of people. It is therefore not smart to focus on these pages, simply because they have a lot of pageviews. For instance we measure numerous sites with forums & chat pages that continually refresh, thus generating many pageviews from relatively few people. These pages do not need attention in the way of marketing optimisation.

what you learn from statistics - briefly

The most interesting statistics tell what is happening on your pages: how long people stay. Average viewing time above 20 seconds is actually very good. Most people click away in less that 10 seconds. Therefore, if people are reading & returning, then you know that the site is actually being used, people are continually coming back to check for information or research / make purchases. You know which information is actually most important, generating more interest. A newspaper has no way of knowing how much time its readers spend on a page, this is a wonderful comparative advantage for a website.

The goal is to take your stats & use them to improve your marketing strategies. This is the point of tracking: evaluate your marketing strategy (i.e. page content) based on performance in terms of visitors to the important pages.

1. Identify important pages.
2. Evaluate their performance based on statistics.

Related reading:

• What are web metrics?
• The difference between hits, visitors, and page views
• How does user tracking work?

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