Ask HN: What are good analytics numbers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are good analytics numbers?

I launched a site approximately about 2 weeks ago and I'm looking at my google analytics numbers. I've never had anything be as successful as this, and I'm generating a few dollars per day in adsense revenue.

But I have no idea what good numbers are. Should I look at visitors? pageviews? avg. time on site? bounce rate?

The site is www.thathigh.com, so my goal is to get people reading and clicking on stuff.

FOR EXAMPLE: is a 50% returning user rate good? is that low? or is that very good?

thanks for any advice. this community is invaluable.

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I guess it depends on your goals; I'm not sure there are really "normal" numbers. Some stuff explodes overnight, some grows over years. Some sites have relatively few, very profitable visitors; others a ton of less-profitable visitors. Some sites get all their traffic from word of mouth, others from Google, others from direct links.

One first cut would be, is your main motivation profit or influence? Optimizing for readers who read your articles and then apply or disseminate what they read isn't quite the same as optimizing for ad revenue. Another one would be: do you intend to build a community around the site or not?

thats a great answer, thanks.

mostly i want to grow the site and make it popular. i'm making a few dollars per day off ads, but my goal is to make a hundred or more dollars per month off the site. then i can work towards more profitability.

my guess is the best way to do this is to build a bit of a community, but nothing like reddit. the site is a clone of fmylife, so basically the same thing i guess.

Have you tried the Google Analytics Benchmarking feature: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2008/03/benchmarking-now-avail... It's pretty neat. It will give you a fair idea of where your website stands comparatively.

you should look at everything... my personal order of importance:

(1) Unique visitors (2) Aggregate Visitors & Pageviews (3) Stickyness (this is avg TOS, bounces, %new vs %returning etc)

numbers are all relative as well.. ie, who cares about a 99% returning user rate if there are only 10 visitors per day.

thanks. what sort of growth is desirable? i literally have 50% new users, 50% returning. is this good? or is it considered too slow?

50% news users and 50% returning is supposedly good. It means you are getting new users (converted from traffic) while at the same time your previous users are returning to use the app.

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