Online Community Management For Dummies®

Chapter 14

Making Decisions Based on Your Findings

In This Chapter

• Driving traffic to a target
• Keeping people talking
• Retaining members
• Walking away gracefully when something isn't working

Your stats do more than just tell you how many people visited your site each day. They also help you identify problem areas, shape your content and community, and provoke some “Eureka!” moments as you get a peek at the habits of your community members. (For a discussion of stats and analytics — what they are, how they work, and why they're important — see Chapter 13.)

In this chapter, I discuss how to use your stats to achieve positive community-building results. If you're not going to act on your findings, it doesn't make sense to go to all the trouble to install a stats program and spend hours analyzing the data.

Generating More Traffic

As a community manager, regardless of the purpose of your community, you're expected to grow traffic on a regular basis. This goal is important because community members are fickle. They come by for a while, but eventually, they get caught up in something else. Very few people stick around for years. Without a fresh crop of new community members coming in, your community will turn into a ghost town.

You also have to drive traffic to a specific target. The goal of a product-based community, for example, is to achieve sales growth. Without knowing your community's traffic habits, you won't be able to drive traffic anywhere, let alone to a sales page. That's ...