Re: Friends of GNOME June numbers

[Claus Schwarm <clschwarm googlemail com>]

On Tue, 2009-07-21 at 04:20 -0600, Stormy Peters wrote:
> The file is good now.
>
> The latest Friends of GNOME numbers are on the wiki,
>
> http://live.gnome.org/action/AttachFile/GnomeMarketing/Tasks/FriendsOfGNOME?action=AttachFile
>
> As you can see, while we had a good April and a terrific May, June
> numbers are way down. It underscores why subscriptions are so
> important - that's the only number that held steady.
>
> I think we could use a Friends of GNOME campaign to encourage people
> to sign up and to get their friends to sign up ...

Well, there are a number of factors. You may like to add some numbers
from the statistics page of www.gnome.org, available here:

http://www.gnome.org/stats/

I just did and there's several points that might be helpful. First, I
tried to get a measure of "conversions" of the wgo/friends page, that
is: I related the number of donors to the number of visitors of the
wgo/friends page. Here's the result:

Jan 2009    0.92
Feb 2009    0.61
Mar 2009    0.70
Apr 2009    1.42
May 2009    2.23
Jun 2009    1.61

Compared to the previous month, the June numbers are not as good, but
it's still better then Apr 2009!

Unfortunately, the result is bad, overall.

The visitor numbers are taken from a field in the monthly stats called
"Top 10 of X Total Entry Pages". In other words, that's the number of
visitors who directly surfed to wgo/friends/ -- probably from the linked
images, maybe from urls in post on planet.gnome.org, maybe from other
sources. It probably does not include people who came to /friends/ from
within wgo!

Thus, it's very likely that the total number of visitors is higher than
the numbers I could use. The conversion rate is thus lower in reality.

And it's also likely that our first friends-of-gnome campaign just
reached those people who are very involved in gnome. Of course, their
number is rather small, so it was to be expected that we could only a
"spike".

So, the first "result" is this: There are two reasons for the drop in
June. (1) The average amount of donations dropped. (2) The text on the
friends page does not "sell". We need to write a better one.


Second, let's have a look at what I call "leads": This is the number of
visitors for wgo/friends/ in relation to the number of visitors of all
pages under www.gnome.org:

Jan 2009    1.27
Feb 2009    0.77
Mar 2009    0.83
Apr 2009    0.83
May 2009    1.20
Jun 2009    0.82

Overall, we don't even get 1 percent of all visitors of the wgo pages to
look at the wgo/friends page. Maybe, we could improve this one, too?

The reason is not just that there's no visible link on the wgo front
page to wgo/friends! For if we look at what people really are looking
for on wgo, it's the project pages! Here are some examples from June:

259,921 /
 72,288 /evolution/
 49,232 /dia/
 42,528 /NetworkManager/
 36,877 /totem/
 36,045 /rhythmbox/
 35,207 /anjuta/
 31,205 /tomboy/
 25,929 /gnumeric/
 24,462 /epiphany/

Btw, I don't know what's wrong here, but except for gnumeric, they all
404'ed! If that's not just due to some problem with Webalizer, there's
lots of traffic we ignore. Why are there no proper 301 redirects for
these pages?

So the other "result" is this: We need to plug friends-of-gnome
images/links on all the project homepages, if we want more leads for the
wgo/friends/ page, not just the wgo front page. And we need to make
sure, these urls are redirected.

On a general side note, Webalizer is not really sufficient to track
stuff like this.


Best regards,
Claus