December 27th, 2008
What Percentage of Your Website Visitors Are Passersby?
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I had recently used Quantcast data to compare the demographic profiles of Facebook and Twitter users.
Loius Gray uses Quantcast data to compare the contribution of addicts (visit website >30 times in a month), regulars (visit website at least once in a month) and passersby (visit website less than once in a month) to the overall traffic at Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, and MySpace –
There’s practically a catch-22 in business when it comes to appeasing your addicts. Lose your most ardent users, and you could find them to be your most vocal detractors, as they feel looked over and spurned. But if you appeal too much to your most addicted users, you could overlook some major gaps in your product that prevent it crossing over to the mainstream. How can you convert those casual passers-by into regular users or even addicts? Therein lies the struggle of growth.
The ideal situation for a website is one in which most of the visitors are regulars or addicts. Both MySpace and Facebook have very high engagement and passersby only contribute to 4% of the traffic at MySpace and 2% of the traffic at Facebook. Twitter is in a transition phase where passersby contribute to 26% of the traffic. Friendfeed seems to be in trouble as passersby contribute to 67% of the traffic.
By the way, passersby contribute 9% of the traffic at Orkut India, 4% at Orkut Brazil and 2% at Orkut.
The number of addicts is also a low 2% (27% of traffic) at Orkut India, compared to 12% (63% of traffic) at Orkut Brazil and 16% (77% of traffic) at Orkut.
While Orkut displays the same characteristics as Facebook and MySpace, I’m a little surprised that Orkut India and Orkut Brazil display less engagement. I suspect that the US skew in the Quantcast data is part of the problem.
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