Probably the most common obsession among online entrepreneurs is related to traffic. How much traffic I could generate with this project? How much traffic do I have right now? How many users are seeing my website each and every day?
In my opinion, traffic is overrated. At the speed of the Internet today, raw traffic is becoming a really volatile metric. Potential users are being literally bombed with loads of information each an every second, so rough numbers are not a reliable way to judge your impact.
The attention span today is much, much narrower than it was 20 years ago, and much narrower than it was 10 or 5 years ago.
So, if you define a person who spent 30 seconds on your website as an “user”, as a potential client, without taking into account the fact that during that tiny window that made him into a “user” he didn’t really had the time to be exposed to anything actionable, then you’re deluding yourself. There’s simply not enough time for that person to become what you want to understand by “user” - namely, a potential client. 3 minutes after he left he can barely remember if and why he visited your website.
So if your goal is to reach 1000 daily visitors or 10.000 daily visitors, you’re equally wrong.
These numbers don’t have an intrinsic value. They’re not telling much about your business.
A much more reliable metric, though, is what I call “the trend”. I use this term broadly, as an umbrella concept for anything that indicates a significant change in the way the product is consumed.
It’s not about how many users you have every day, but how your website is impacting people over a certain period of time.
It’s how much time they spend over certain areas or performing certain tasks. It’s how much they interact with the content. How they distribute the content, how they are consuming it, on what platform, and so on.
The trends, even on a very small “universe”, like 100 or 200 users daily are more relevant than the sheer number. Because, based on the feedback you receive from their activity, you can change what’s not working, add what’s missing and enhance what can be enhanced.
A Small Steemit Scenario
For instance, at the moment of writing this article, Steemit has around 100.000 users. But, from those 100.000 only less than 2.000 (actually, around 1.500) are providing content on a consistent basis. And there are around 2-3.000 who are curating content.
These are the key areas for this specific project. Your own online project will most likely have a different set of key areas. If it’s an online store, one of the key metrics would be, for instance, how many users are abandoning shopping cart and in what step. But for Steemit, these are the numbers that are actually counting.
So what’s important is the trend of authors and curators.
Are these numbers going up or down? Is there any correlation between the two? Or, is there any correlation between the writers and the total number of users?
We have a few scenarios to take into account:
total number of users going up - but the number of authors remaining at the same level (so the actual percentage of creators will decrease).
total number of users remaining the same - but the number of authors growing (so the actual percentage of creators will increase, but on a limited universe)
total number of users going up - and total number of creators going up proportionally (so the actual percentage of creators will remain the same, but on a growing universe)
total number of users going up - and total number of authors going up faster than that (so the actual percentage of creators will outperform the growth of “users”)
Each and every scenario will call for a different action. For instance, if the total number of users is going up, but the total number of writers is going down, as a percent, than Steemit creators may think of a way to entice people to write more.
Compare this with the bare scenario of “we have to go from 100.000 users to 120.000 in two months”. Is this relevant for a business like Steemit?
My answer is a “no”.
So, instead of chasing for “more users”, try looking for trends. Even more, start by understanding what are the key metrics of your website / app. Whic actions are driving the consumption up and which actions are slowing it down?
Think in actions performed by the users, not in thousands of dry numbers laid out in a nice chart.
At the end of the day, the rough number of users is pretty much useless, if you don’t know how exactly you are impacting them.
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I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running.
