How we can help steemit pass reddit! A Look at the Basics of Web Analytics

I've seen quite a few posts on here going for the basic web stats you can find at alexa and similarweb and that's great!

Since we're all partial investors in the growth of steemit, as users and owners of steem, it's good that we keep an eye on things. What's not useful is typing "steemit.com" into either of these sites, copying the pictures, and posting them here. We need analysis and actionable insights! Or, at the very least, an understanding of what those metrics are measuring.

So here's a quick rundown of the most common terms you'll see.

Bounce Rate: On Alexa this means how often a user leaves after viewing one page and no more content. For a site like steemit where our goal is consuming content we want this to be as low as possible and every percentage counts. Most of the comparisons coming out have us around 5% behind reddit.

That's a ton when you stretch those out into real numbers. That five percent difference in users are extremely unlikely to have made an account and are less likely to search out steemit in the future. All this matters because that means they will not end up spreading the good word of steemit and that compounds into the future.

Avg. Visit Duration:This is very easy to understand. It's merely how long each user stayed per visit (non-unique). We'll be behind other social media sites as long as our content is substandard and our tags are limited. The more we invite others in and make them feel welcome within a community they appreciate the more content people will consume. This drives up visit duration and is exactly what we want for a site like steemit to expand.

Pages per Visit:Ties in well with content and community. If you can't find more posts you're interested in, you're out. Simple as that. I'm honestly shocked we compete as well as we do on this metric.

Pure speculation tells me this is because of peoples interest in either learning how the blockchain works or learning how to strike it rich. Either way, they're staying on site and we should take advantage of that.

**Monthly Visits: ** This is non-unique, so each time you or I visit we're counted. This is just about the most useless stat you can look at without diving into it. Thankfully steemd gives us a view of active users and total unique accounts. But even that number will be slightly inflated due to bots.

*If anyone is interested in retention, and doesn't have access to the analytics account, I'd start tracking at steemd.

This was the short and sweet of it. I'm a big fan of understanding your tools and we have a lot of them. The above analytics barely scratch the surface of what we could be looking at.