Forum Moderators: rogerd
What are good conversion rates (signups per unique visits)? We are getting about 3% (850 uniques to date / 30 members)?
Whats a good average for signup over time? (We launched May 1, started marketing May 5, and have received 30 signups (free))
Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
I'd say that a lot comes down to motivation and effort. Motivation: how attractive are the benefits of registration, i.e., will they see content they can't see but want to? How else will they benefit?
Effort: How difficult is it to sign up? Just an email address? A multipage form? Personal info? Email verification? Simple and easy should produce more signups than difficult and multi-layered.
On one busy community that I admin, the signup rate varies, but I'd guess it's in a similar order of magnitude.
I'm also testing a blog rating widget that lets visitors easily rate or review a site. Signup (to make the rating count) for non-members of the rating site is three tiny lines. While I'm just getting started with this test, it's kind of surprising how few visitors have taken action despite the simplicity of the process.
Rather than trying to compare to other sites, I suggest you use the baseline you have established as a comparison point to try changing things to make registration easier, more attractive, etc. Competing against your old data will produce the most meaningful results.
Coming from an Interactive Design background this is the first time i've been involved in a site past design and deployment. I'm attempting to judge whether or not the site is worth the time or if i should move on to a different industry using the app i've created. (It's applicable to almost any industry)
How should i judge whether my traffic is sufficient? Or how long should it take to build a small community? More importantly, whats too long?
These are very difficult to answer in a general way. As an extremely general rule, a community should show signs of life within a few months, and should be going strong in a year. It may not be wildly successful, but conversations should be self-sustaining.
