Results from our Alpha period.
I’ve been asked by a couple of people about our stats during the alpha test of http://styleguidance.com Which by the way, we are officially launching tomorrow!
So I figure, I might as well make it a blog post, so that I have the data for the future and maybe it’ll give others another data point to look at, when planning their alpha/beta/launch. BTW, these are stats based on Google Analytics, which usually tend to underreport the numbers so keep that in mind.
First of all, I consider the alpha period to be from November 2nd to November 15th. Pretty much two weeks. That’s the time, when I sought out feedback from my starter users. Thanks to the feedback, the site was pretty much redesigned 5 times, until we hit something that most people liked.
The overall response has been very positive, everyone loved the idea, the only thing we caught beef for, was the original design. And you know what they say, if the only thing your users complain about, is your design, you are onto something!
Anyways, onto the data:
During the 2 week alpha period we had 1045 uniques come to the site. Out of those, 111, completed a priority action. A priority action is basically asking a question or posting an answer. So basically we had a 10% participation rate, which I hear is pretty good for a brand new site. I hear the typical number is closer to 1%.
We’ve collected a ton of feedback during the alpha period. 260 comments and 147 emails to be exact. The feedback went a long way towards improving the looks of the site. The main complaint was that the original version looked too much like software people used at work, so we went through 5 redesigns, till we hit something everyone liked. Basically the site was completely crowd sourced, the users picked everything, from the domain name, to the design elements, they even had me redo the logo at the last moment.
For page views, we hit 11.2K page views during the 2 weeks. On average, each person had 7 page views and spent about 7 minutes 43 seconds on the site. The visitor return rate was 32.25%, which means that 1 in 3 people liked the site enough to want to come back.
While we are on the views, 52% of all visitors viewed more than one page. With 6.18% viewing more than 20 pages.
Traffic was 32% direct/word of mouth, and 67% from referrals. Referrals are basically the sites where I asked for feedback. The direct users stayed on average of 16 minutes, compared to 3 minutes for referrals.
Location wise, as you’d expect, 73.99% came from U.S. and 6.50% came from Canada. I’d say the most surprising number is the one person that came from Liechtenstein.
For browser specs, most users were using Firefox and only 5.4% were using Internet Explorer. This is good, because the Internet Explorer version of the site doesn’t have rounded corners because IE sucks. Hey Microsoft, how about entering the 21st century?
For resolutions, the majority of the users are using the 1280x800 and 1280x768 resolutions. Only 11% of users had 1024x768 or less.
Once again the site is http://styleguidance.com and we are officially launching tomorrow.
