A tail of two trends: retention climbing with overall traffic down

I'm ignorant (honest) in how to build, run and grow a community. Sure, I've got experience - loads of people do. However every community is different. Ever lived in the east coast of the US, then moved out west? Or vice versa? You get what I'm saying: culture, values, modes of interaction, norms...it's all different. We may (those of us who are, anyway) be all Americans...but, I'm a Californian first an American, second.

Most folks I've met feel the same way.

What's this got to do with FunAdvice? Well, if you read our blog...the last post talked about how overall traffic is down. Perhaps that's a good thing. Retention, as we define it, is still higher than ever and growing...wow. What's that mean?

For me, personally, it means that I'm still clueless: I would have thought constant growth in *new* traffic would increase retention, where a decrease in new visitors would decrease overall retention, as the fractional value of new visitors that convert to regular members goes down (given that it is a consistent percentage of new visitors overtime). Is that egg on my face? One sec, lemme grab a napkin.

Better. So where does this leave us? Well, there was a Google study (am I saying that too often to too many people?) they did in researching the impact of latency on their audience...fascinating stuff. What they found was that people who experienced (5%) of their audience a "slower Google" over 3 weeks conducted less searches, over the next three weeks, than the average Google user. Yikes!

Google is a brand worth $100 million dollars, according to some media pundits. That's big, in case you're wondering. There are also studies that suggest simply putting the Google logo on other search results (Bing / Yahoo / etc) will improve the perception of relevance, even if those are *not* Google search results. Wow.

Two issues, then: one is that if your brand is powerful...it matters. The other one is that nothing is more powerful a predictor on visitor behavior than site speed. Yuck. In other words: if FunAdvice works fast, we're more likely to pick up more heavy users of our system...if we work slow, we're *less* likely. Thus it could be the uptick in retention is a function of our increased speed (as we got faster with less overall new traffic to the site).

I'm not an engineer, so, I can't do anything about the speed. We are working on it, though (have you ever thought a website was "too fast"? Me neither).

Second, the "brand" issue...what does FunAdvice stand for? Well, if you read our about page...we spell it out pretty clearly. I spent this morning reading the blogs of some competitors (I've mentioned them here before) and looking at the complaints they were getting. Well, we're not perfect here, either: but we'll try to do better. And, feel free to call me on it, if we don't improve: I'm willing to listen, I won't bite your head off, AND, I'll thank you for it.

Coping with disaster: are you ready to deal with a 55% drop in your business?

It's been a long, long time (eight years, in fact) since I've personally dealt with a business I owned having taken it in the shorts as FunAdvice did in August. Thus the reason we didn't crow about the quantcast, the compete, etc, updates with our glorious ever growing traffic numbers this month. They didn't grow.

In fact, we hit 6.9 million in July, about 4.2 million in August and our run rate this month is for a meager 3.3 million visitors, if we're lucky. What happened?

1) Aggressive marketing - I'll put my hand up on this one. Lock, stock and barrel. Sometimes when you sit too close to the fire you get burned ya? We did. Lesson learned.

2) Perhaps you don't have a good comparison for what we went through...well, I've consulted with nearly 60 companies on online marketing strategic, tactics and helped them execute. Only two companies grew faster than FunAdvice did for a six month period, in all the companies we have ever worked with. There was a specific reason for both of them growing faster than us. Simply put: we were on fire.

3) The collapse happened and now we're back to the same strategy as before (which I've come around to accepting is the only strategy that builds scale, value and provides disaster proof returns: helping people one person at a time.

Marketing at the relationship level for us has always provided a massive return. "Mass" marketing for us has simply never worked...sure, we hit a random ball out of the park with our second press release (getting the NY Times pick up was sweet)...but really what we need to do is simply grind it out. One person, one relationship and building block at a time.

When (or if, really) disaster strikes, don't:
1) Make rash decisions - I made things worse, delayed recovery for two weeks and cost our site revenue, cost members the excitement of the connections they could have made, etc.

2) Blame the team - if you're running the show, the buck stops there. End of story. I'd personally LOVE it if somebody else stepped up and said it was me...but, they can't, because they'd be lying. I'm not going to encourage that, as business only works when you deal with reality, not somebody's hopeful version of it.

3) Be a jerk. I whined, I'm not too proud to admit it. You know what it got me? Zero. One night, I slept with such pain in my chest I could barely breath...it sucked. Badly. Take a deep breath and realize, remember: if you're still breathing, keep your health and live to fight another day.

4) Skip analysis: point of fact I had enough data in 3-5 days to make the right decisions. Instead, I let my ego cloud my judgement and spent two weeks waiting for nothing to start digging into things. If this happens to you remember to think quickly and smartly but only act once the data is clear. You can't have too much clarity and yes, bounce your ideas off of somebody. Outline your thinking, it may help you from jumping further over the edge.

Bottom line is you have noticed FunAdvice is less busy, well, it is. The good news is we've installed some new software so our site is working on a per visitor basis, better than ever. And, we uncovered (thanks to the drop) a series of bugs that had been plaguing us for a long time. So we'll get back there...it's just a matter of time, and building things with the right foundation.