15th
My notes from last night’s SEMPO Meetup
At last night’s SEMPO Meetup at Google’s offices, Dani Horowitz opened up her live Google Analytics account and led a collaborative discussion on how to improve the metrics of her business. She was extremely open and courageous, and I wanted to thank her for sharing.
Dani owns and operates Daniweb, an IT Community for Developers and Technology Enthusiasts. The site has numerous forums for developers to ask questions, share solutions and find code snippets to solve their coding problems.
Her site does a great job in ranking very highly on the long tail of keyword searches, with lots of links deep into her site. Over 90% of her traffic comes from search, and her site is clearly a trusted authority on technical subjects such as “Round Robin Algorithm,” where her site ranks 3rd in the natural rankings, just after the first two Wikipedia entries.
The big challenges she highlighted for her business were a high bounce rate (80%+), and a low average pages per visit (1.3). She also is focused on signing up new registered users.
Dani has run numerous split A/B tests in the past around site design. For example, she introduced a brief interstitial, which increased new registrations from 200 per day up to 2000 per day.
A couple of interesting suggestions came from the audience:
- People love to be recognized for the work and value they bring to a community. A similar site called Stackoverflow rewards highly engaged commenters and posters with reputation points.
- Deploying a collaborative filtering mechanism (like Amazon’s book recommendation feature - people who like this book like that book, or people who like Round Robin Algorithms also like XYZ????) or a semantic text mining technology that can guide users to other useful topics could increase page views per user.
It was suggested that future SEMPO meetings be devoted to semantic technology, the problem of attributing clicks and conversions to advertisements and search terms, and a July cruise. They all sound fun to me! :)
Photo of Dani via Max Kalehoff’s Flickr
