Engagement is very critical to the long term success of a content platform. In a world of Internet attention-deficit disorder (ADD) keeping someone engaged for any significant amount of time on any website is difficult. There are three standard measures of engagement used in Alexa, one of the main traffic ranking websites. Here is how Steemit stacks up against Medium and Reddit.
Great job so far!
Bounce Rate
The first metric bounce rate measures what percentage of people leave the website after viewing just one page. You can imagine as users surf the web and encounter new websites, if the first page doesn't impress users they'll quickly move on. Sometimes people move on quickly because they're looking for something specific and don't find it at first glance. Hence bounce rate can correlate with the relevance of key word search traffic and improving that is not always easy. However there are many other factors that may turn off new users. According to this infographic, a typical content website bounce rate is between 40% and 60%. The lower the better and Steemit is on the lower end at 43.7% and below Medium's 53.8%. Reddit has an impressive 27% bounce rate. The Hubspot infographic has some suggestions to improve the bounce rate including: 1) Enhance usability & navigation 2) Create good layout & make responsive 3) Improve pageload speeds 4) Improve calls to action.
The Steemit landing page UI seems to be very good. However I think the biggest improvement can be made to the slogan, tagline and the call to action. Right now we see: “Empowering communities” + “Post it. Share it. Steemit!” Too vague?
Something like @pfunk's : “Your Voice Is Worth Something” + “Post. Vote. Get Paid (or Rewarded)” may improve bounce rate and conversions. @andrarchy also has a contest for slogans here. It will be good to A/B test what works. For the call to action maybe “Sign up” instead of “Get Started”? Also $2 in Steem power may be confusing. What is Steem power? Maybe write something like “You can earn hundreds each month. Sign up today!” ?
Daily Pageviews per Visitor & Daily Time on Site
Daily pageviews per visitor and daily time on site are very important measures of user engagement. The daily pageviews track how many different pages a user visits each day. Compared to search-driven browsing where people look for answers to a specific question or to read a specific article, platforms with a variety of content and categories can get users coming back to discover new content. Steemit has twice the amount of daily pageviews as Medium (5.8 vs 2.72). As we diversify into more categories, the # of daily pageviews should only increase!
The average daily time on the site is a measure of how long people are engaged in the content. The daily time on Steemit is nearly 10 minutes compared to only 2:51 for Medium! We still have some catching up to do with Reddit, but they've built up content for many years.
It will be good to keep track of all these numbers so we can find ways to improve and monitor the progress of Steemit.