Building (and measuring) community of visitors to your site

[hassen1]

One secret of sites like Amazon, ebay, Hotmail / MSN, and Yahoo is 'customer loyalty', which means a community of returning visitors. These sites have generated trust.

To begin replicating this process for your own site, benchmark your traffic community.

It is helpful to visualize these people, and imagine them coming in & out of your store.

Some sites we measure have a very good returning visitor ratio of 30-40%. This group of visitors is their customer client-base, the community. So, if a community has 100,000 members, over a given period of time, two months for example, then you have the population of a small city coming to your site and returning. This means that people are actively using the info in some way.

The useful aspect of this information could not be deduced from 'pageviews' alone, but is only interesting when the pageviews are correlated to unique visitors. This will tell you how many pages the average visitor looks at, for example.

There are road signs to tell you how a community is behaving. A community comprised of first-time visitors has few variables. All you know at this stage, for example, is that your campaign generates first-time visitors. Therefore the best investment is to try and build a community of returning visitors and study their behavior. We have a community at opentracker that returns on a regular basis. If this community starts to visit our site less frequently and for shorter periods of time, using less information, we will take a look at the indicators and evaluate why such changes are taking place.

[humpty]

that's a very good way to keep you customers coming back to your site, and all professional sites would not miss stuidying the data and details about their visitors to identify what features on your website make the most unique or returning visitors