ZacFields
03-16-2008, 05:48 PM
Mods/Admin and invited friends,
I'd like to start by saying that I am glad that we've all survived this rough winter. I've been in Iowa since the 3rd grade, and I can't remember ever having a winter this bad. I think it's safe to say that everyone has been getting cabin fever, but luckily for us all, it seems to be nearing an end.
I will go ahead and get this started, please remember that most of what you read is confidential information, and I'd appreciate if it wasn't shared with anyone.
__________________________________________________ __________________
Traffic
Some of you may remember back to when "CR:Underground" was in it's prime. During that time, we were receiving around 1.7 million hits per month. First, I will share with you the last two months' worth of stats.
January
Hits: 518,060
Unique Visitors: 2,135
February
Hits: 443,315
Unique Visitors: 1,992
Now, after 15 days in the books for March, here are the stats for this month up til now.
March
Hits: 293,200
Unique Visitors: 1,386
Some traffic loss was expected. With the name change to "Iowa Auto Forums," we expected to lose a certain percentage of our traffic. To those people who were not following the site very closely, our name change was a simple message for them: "We have moved on," and I believe a lot of people chose that moment to stop visiting.
We should also be down on traffic due to the time of year. Unfortunately since we moved to this new server after the last summer, I do not have stats or projections for what kind of traffic to expect this summer.
__________________________________________________ __________________
Retention/Repeat Visits
One thing I'd like to point out is that we're getting just as many "Unique Visitors" now as we were when the website was in it's prime. This is an indication that we are lacking visitor retention. This tells me that people are visiting the site, but they're not finding it interesting enough to stay here.
I'd like to brainstorm (in another topic) what kinds of things we could add to IAF in order to increase retention. For statistics sake, I will compute "retention" as the ratio of unique visitors in relation to total visits. "Unique Visitors" is just the amount of different IP addresses that have accessed the site in one month. "Total Visits" are the total amount of times those visitors came to the site. Every time you come to IAF, leave, and then come back again that counts as another visit. In this ratio, the smaller the percentage, the better. Smaller percentage means that less of our total visits are from people who only visited one time. Here are the computations for retention for the first two months of this year.
January: 27.6%
February: 28.02%
*March: 27.4%
*Partial month
These numbers are a percentage of our total visits from people who only visited the site one time. Some of this number is made up of the various different search engines that visit the site with 10 different IP's every day. This number could never realistically be lower than 5% minimum.
Let's start off by making the goal for retention be 25%. We will revisit this in the coming months and see if we can actually arrange for the goal to be lower.
__________________________________________________ _____________________
How to improve retention
This is a simple answer: Get people to come back to the site. For instance, the more people that use IAF as their home page, the better retention will be because they're likely visiting the site at least once a day, or 30-31 times per month at least. They would be contributing to a retention percentage of 3% (1 divided by 30).
We need to formulate ideas that will cause people to want to check the site every time they get on the internet. Here are just a couple of ideas that I have:
Adding a portal page with news information on it. We could use the home page to advertise local car shows and other car-related events in the area. This may prompt more people to return to the site on a regular basis, and would be a valuable service for our current members.
[/*:m:2wrw8yec]
With that portal page, reinstating "ROTM" (ride of the month). In the past this seemed to be a "crowd-pleaser" and prompted a lot of people to make return visits to the site. The last 5 days of each month always had higher traffic of people coming back to the site to check on the polls.
[/*:m:2wrw8yec]
Having more IAF get-togethers that are advertised on the home page. Preferably more of the types of gatherings that are cost-effective such as dinners, car show gatherings, etc.
[/*:m:2wrw8yec]
We need more multimedia. Perhaps we need to reinstate some sort of photo gallery of our events like we've had in years past. [/*:m:2wrw8yec]
Overall, we need to formulate ideas that will keep people coming back. When submitting ideas, think about what would make you want to visit the site more often. Think about websites that you visit on a daily basis; why do you visit them? What keeps you coming back?
__________________________________________________ _________________
Server Efficiency
When submitting ideas, I'd like to try and be as "server efficient" as possible. Anything that can be done simply by creating a new forum rather than trying to install 3rd party modifications to the site is preferable. That is not to say that I won't install 3rd party mods to the site, but I'd like to try and stay away from the server mess that our old site was under that ultimately ended up with me paying $80/month to host the site.
For example: Our merchandise forum. Rather than installing a shopping cart system on the site, I simply created a forum for us to showcase our merchandise. That is a good example of server resource efficiency.
__________________________________________________ __________________
IAF Picnic
We need to decide if we want to do the Picnic this year, or if we want to forgo the picnic in favor of just trying to be more close-knit in general this summer (exe: calling a lot more general gatherings). I suspect most of you are going to want to do a picnic, but let's at least discuss it. Ashley and I are being a lot more stingy with our money lately, and unfortunately if we do a picnic we would like to try and keep the out-of-pocket expense as small as possible.
One idea may be to begin calling for donations in advance via Paypal in order to try and soften the blow.
__________________________________________________ __________________
The Garage
I get asked this question a lot, and I am deeply sorry (still) that this is taking so long. Rest assured that this is not something that is under my control. Unfortunately the software is still in beta form, so I cannot add it to the forum yet. I still have the data from the old garage, and I hope to be able to convert it in the future. I have no estimate of finish date, but my hope is that the software developers understand the urgency of having it done before summer.
__________________________________________________ __________________
Rules for this meeting
I think I've covered all the main things I'd like to cover. I hope this post spurs some ideas/topics for us to discuss. I will leave this meeting forum open for a while so we can organize our discussions about the progression of the site.
If you know any other mods that don't access the site often, please let them know to come in.
Please start all new discussions with a new topic in this folder. This will help us organize our different discussions and make it easier to decide which ideas are "going somewhere" and which ones are not.
Thanks for all your continued help, guys. Hopefully we can have some good discussions about where we want to go and things we want to add to the site.
I'd like to start by saying that I am glad that we've all survived this rough winter. I've been in Iowa since the 3rd grade, and I can't remember ever having a winter this bad. I think it's safe to say that everyone has been getting cabin fever, but luckily for us all, it seems to be nearing an end.
I will go ahead and get this started, please remember that most of what you read is confidential information, and I'd appreciate if it wasn't shared with anyone.
__________________________________________________ __________________
Traffic
Some of you may remember back to when "CR:Underground" was in it's prime. During that time, we were receiving around 1.7 million hits per month. First, I will share with you the last two months' worth of stats.
January
Hits: 518,060
Unique Visitors: 2,135
February
Hits: 443,315
Unique Visitors: 1,992
Now, after 15 days in the books for March, here are the stats for this month up til now.
March
Hits: 293,200
Unique Visitors: 1,386
Some traffic loss was expected. With the name change to "Iowa Auto Forums," we expected to lose a certain percentage of our traffic. To those people who were not following the site very closely, our name change was a simple message for them: "We have moved on," and I believe a lot of people chose that moment to stop visiting.
We should also be down on traffic due to the time of year. Unfortunately since we moved to this new server after the last summer, I do not have stats or projections for what kind of traffic to expect this summer.
__________________________________________________ __________________
Retention/Repeat Visits
One thing I'd like to point out is that we're getting just as many "Unique Visitors" now as we were when the website was in it's prime. This is an indication that we are lacking visitor retention. This tells me that people are visiting the site, but they're not finding it interesting enough to stay here.
I'd like to brainstorm (in another topic) what kinds of things we could add to IAF in order to increase retention. For statistics sake, I will compute "retention" as the ratio of unique visitors in relation to total visits. "Unique Visitors" is just the amount of different IP addresses that have accessed the site in one month. "Total Visits" are the total amount of times those visitors came to the site. Every time you come to IAF, leave, and then come back again that counts as another visit. In this ratio, the smaller the percentage, the better. Smaller percentage means that less of our total visits are from people who only visited one time. Here are the computations for retention for the first two months of this year.
January: 27.6%
February: 28.02%
*March: 27.4%
*Partial month
These numbers are a percentage of our total visits from people who only visited the site one time. Some of this number is made up of the various different search engines that visit the site with 10 different IP's every day. This number could never realistically be lower than 5% minimum.
Let's start off by making the goal for retention be 25%. We will revisit this in the coming months and see if we can actually arrange for the goal to be lower.
__________________________________________________ _____________________
How to improve retention
This is a simple answer: Get people to come back to the site. For instance, the more people that use IAF as their home page, the better retention will be because they're likely visiting the site at least once a day, or 30-31 times per month at least. They would be contributing to a retention percentage of 3% (1 divided by 30).
We need to formulate ideas that will cause people to want to check the site every time they get on the internet. Here are just a couple of ideas that I have:
Adding a portal page with news information on it. We could use the home page to advertise local car shows and other car-related events in the area. This may prompt more people to return to the site on a regular basis, and would be a valuable service for our current members.
[/*:m:2wrw8yec]
With that portal page, reinstating "ROTM" (ride of the month). In the past this seemed to be a "crowd-pleaser" and prompted a lot of people to make return visits to the site. The last 5 days of each month always had higher traffic of people coming back to the site to check on the polls.
[/*:m:2wrw8yec]
Having more IAF get-togethers that are advertised on the home page. Preferably more of the types of gatherings that are cost-effective such as dinners, car show gatherings, etc.
[/*:m:2wrw8yec]
We need more multimedia. Perhaps we need to reinstate some sort of photo gallery of our events like we've had in years past. [/*:m:2wrw8yec]
Overall, we need to formulate ideas that will keep people coming back. When submitting ideas, think about what would make you want to visit the site more often. Think about websites that you visit on a daily basis; why do you visit them? What keeps you coming back?
__________________________________________________ _________________
Server Efficiency
When submitting ideas, I'd like to try and be as "server efficient" as possible. Anything that can be done simply by creating a new forum rather than trying to install 3rd party modifications to the site is preferable. That is not to say that I won't install 3rd party mods to the site, but I'd like to try and stay away from the server mess that our old site was under that ultimately ended up with me paying $80/month to host the site.
For example: Our merchandise forum. Rather than installing a shopping cart system on the site, I simply created a forum for us to showcase our merchandise. That is a good example of server resource efficiency.
__________________________________________________ __________________
IAF Picnic
We need to decide if we want to do the Picnic this year, or if we want to forgo the picnic in favor of just trying to be more close-knit in general this summer (exe: calling a lot more general gatherings). I suspect most of you are going to want to do a picnic, but let's at least discuss it. Ashley and I are being a lot more stingy with our money lately, and unfortunately if we do a picnic we would like to try and keep the out-of-pocket expense as small as possible.
One idea may be to begin calling for donations in advance via Paypal in order to try and soften the blow.
__________________________________________________ __________________
The Garage
I get asked this question a lot, and I am deeply sorry (still) that this is taking so long. Rest assured that this is not something that is under my control. Unfortunately the software is still in beta form, so I cannot add it to the forum yet. I still have the data from the old garage, and I hope to be able to convert it in the future. I have no estimate of finish date, but my hope is that the software developers understand the urgency of having it done before summer.
__________________________________________________ __________________
Rules for this meeting
I think I've covered all the main things I'd like to cover. I hope this post spurs some ideas/topics for us to discuss. I will leave this meeting forum open for a while so we can organize our discussions about the progression of the site.
If you know any other mods that don't access the site often, please let them know to come in.
Please start all new discussions with a new topic in this folder. This will help us organize our different discussions and make it easier to decide which ideas are "going somewhere" and which ones are not.
Thanks for all your continued help, guys. Hopefully we can have some good discussions about where we want to go and things we want to add to the site.