Re: Friends of GNOME June numbers

[Claus Schwarm <clschwarm googlemail com>]

Yes, we should do these both.

Concerning trying different things out: It's not a good idea to make a
sequential change. The result could be skewed due to external
influences.

Better to make a proper split test. The /friends/ page seem to be using
jQuery anyway, so it should not be too complicated for our hackers to
make a script that replaces certain parts of the text and add a tracking
code to the result URL /friends/step2.php.

For example, the control headline could gets "&ref=1" added to the URL
while experimental headline could get "&ref=2" added.

Then, we would need to track these in a database or text file with the
php code of step2.php. Maybe, we could also add these to the paypal
link, so we'd could test the second step page, too.

This way, we could track what changes perform better and whether people
stop after the initial step. It might not be perfect but it's better
then dealing with external influences.


Best regards,
Claus


On Tue, 2009-07-21 at 14:52 -0600, Stormy Peters wrote:
> Thanks, Claus. Data is always really, really helpful!
> 
> So it sounds like we should do two things:
> 1) Work on improving the text on Friends of GNOME
> 2) Add donate buttons or links on the project pages
> 
> For #1, we could try different things out for a couple of weeks at a
> time and see what the impact is.
> 
> Stormy
> 
> On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 1:13 PM, Claus Schwarm
> <clschwarm googlemail com> wrote:
>         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
>         
>