Not sure if there’s an appropriate category for discussing performance data (perhaps UX), but was curious to hear what others have found.
We seem to do a good job at attracting website visitors, but it very difficult for us to get them to come back (or register). Would anyone else be interested in sharing their weekly cohort analysis report from Google Analytics for benchmarking purposes?
Note that in week 1 after first vist, we see roughly 1/40 users coming back to the site. By week 7, we see less than 1/200 users coming back.
I have higher retention, but I think the numbers will depend a lot on what type of forum you have.
Here’s my chart of user growth this year.
As you can see, I did something in that doubled my signup rate overnight in February. I’m sharing how I did it and many more tips on how to increase engagement and retention in my free newsletter at discoursemetrics.com (use the form on the right side of the page).
I’m still working on growing engagement by trying different things, but I think I’m on the right path:
It would be interesting to have Discourse (the company) have a checkbox on every Admin Interface for every Discourse forum where it allows you to share your forums’ stats that are gathered and shared via the admin interface (anonymously so your specific site is not identified) - to a main Discourse-managed server that would then provide insights and comparisons on your site’s interactions, growth, segment, etc - compared to all the other Discourse forums. Sort of a crowd-sourced insights feature that helps sites understand what is going on in their forums compared to other forums, and allow the admins to self identify in a given category (e.g. some standard industry classifications - for healthcare, gaming, sports, etc… related forums.
I’m just looking for ways to increase the cycle speed for learning and ultimately improving the success of all discourse-based forums. Seems like something Discourse would want to provide, and gives them another way to help users, and forum managers, and increase the speed of innovation for all of us.
That report considers posts created as the criteria for considering a user active during a month, but the report could also be modified further depending on how you wanted to specific types of track retention data on your site.
