The Loyalty Index: Why it Should Be One of your Top Numbers

Back in the early days of the web, I worked in this small startup funded by a large public company. Life was good. We were pioneers heading into an uncharted jungle.

One of the first things we were discussing was how to measure the success of our web operation. Back then a lot of people were talking about “hits”, which seemed like a bad metric, as each hit would be an individual element on the page (like a page with 4 images would result in 5 hits). We decided to use pageviews instead.

We also knew we wanted to track unique visitors per month (i.e. if one visitor visits 5 times in a month, he’s counted as 1). This would tell us how many actual visitors were coming to our site.

But we knew there was something missing from this picture. We also wanted to know how well we were keeping our users “hooked” into our content. We decided to also have repeat visitors as part of our top goals and measurements.

This really worked. Even though the site was content centric (it was a network of radio station websites), we managed to add a lot of social features to it, so that users had a reason to come back often.

Today, I don’t hear about repeat visits any more in any of the business circles I move in. I hear a lot about user engagement and “let’s get a ton of traffic” or “how do I get more followers”.

You can get a lot of people come to your site. They’ll sample it and go on their way. But to really know your site is succesful, you need them to come back often.

All of the major data mining solutions have this metric. Some call it “Repeat Visitors”, other (like Google Analytics) call it “Visitor Loyalty”.

No matter what it’s called, you should have this number front and center and check it every day.

I was discussing this with one of the influential bloggers (and mentor, I should say) Louis Gray, and how I felt loyalty as one of the most important metrics of any site. He was kind enough to share with me his loyalty numbers, but he told me something that was very revealing to me:

I consider my RSS subscribers and FriendFeed subscribers are loyal. The goal for me is to drive traffic to the feeds, not necessarily the blog.

Even though Louis is on the right mindset, I don’t think I completely agree, and here’s why.

RSS subscribers might see your content, but they might or might not click through to your site. If you put bad content most of the time, you will still see your subscriber counts growing, but your site’s loyalty going down, as people space their visits more and more.

Of course you want to have all your metrics in a growth path. But you also want some of that growth to become regulars to check out your content. That is how you form a platform of real followers, people who become your fans.

Let’s look at some numbers. First, this is what the loyalty graph looks for this blog in the past 30 days (click to enlarge):

As you can see, 88% of the users visited for the first time, and only 60+ users are coming more often (which is about 3% of the visits).

Louis shared the same graph, and here’s what he has:

In his case he has much more users visiting the site (of course) but look at the percentage of first time visitors: it’s 78%. Compared to my 88%, his site shows much more loyalty, and he has a bunch of users who go to his blog many times per month.

Last, but not least, I want to show the stats for my social networking site, Oyeme.com:

If you’re looking at the first row, you’ll notice the percentage of first time visitors is 69%. Not only that, about 15% of the users visit many times per month.

So the rule of thumb here is to constantly monitor that 1 times visit percentage and try to lower it down month by month. If you get to a 70% level, you’re doing absolutely great. It’s good to have a number of people discovering your site for the first time, but at least 30% of the users should be visiting more than once.

Then you’ll know you’re building a loyal audience that will support your growth for months to come.

Photo by chasing butterflies

Tagged as: data, loyalty