Hey, what are you all looking at?
On etcconnect.com, that is.
I just finished compiling an internal report on web activity on our site for May, and thought it might be interesting to share openly some notable ETC web trends.
First of all, we've been having a great start to 2008. Before May, every month had brought more visitors to our site than the last. April was our second-busiest month on etcconnect.com since we started using Google Analytics to track web activity back in Q2 2007. Even though growth stalled (for the moment) in May, we're still topping our averages from the previous six months, and seeing double-digit percentage growth in visits from countries like China and Australia. May brought visits from over 130 countries and from every continent.
Thirty-two countries accounted for more than 100 visits, and a dozen
countries generated 500 visits or more.
So, what's getting all the attention from our customers online? Here's what we're seeing from the whole - does it reflect your usage, too?
Not all that surprisingly, we get a lot of customers looking for product support information - posting questions or looking for answers in the forums, finding datasheets and other product details, downloading software updates. In fact, in May, support-related content accounted for about 30% of pageviews on etcconnect.com in May. The online community, where you're reading this post, captured nearly 43,000 pageviews all by itself! What was launched on a hunch a little more than a year ago has become a tremendous resource for our business partners and end users, and their use of it and contributions to it make it better every day. People like you are bookmarking our forums and making them one of your regular online destinations, and we thank you whole-heartedly for that!
As a company built on both great service and great products, we naturally get a lot of people researching for purchases of controls, fixtures, dimming networking and more. With millions sold, it's also no wonder that the Source Four is the most popular product section on etcconnect.com. A photometric tool and minisite for the Source Four that was produced two years ago still averages thousands of hits each month. Pages highlighting our newest entertainment console, Ion, has been a traffic magnet for months, but we still get gobs of people looking for information on Express consoles, too, after all these years. This was surprising to me when I started working here, and then I began to understand ETC's extreme dedication to supporting users of ALL its products.
In May, we launched Congo v5, and supported that groundbreaking software release with a series of videos on etcconnect.com. The two main videos produced for this page by the Congo team - "Don't
own a Congo?" and "Already own a Congo, but not v5?" - were each
available in three sizes. Which set of videos was more popular? Neither! Each video (when combining the views of all three sizes) captured exactly 404 views in May. Say what you will about the accuracy of exact view counts in web reporting, but this is a great example of etcconnect.com capturing consumers in different stages of a purchase or usage cycle - and delivering appropriate information to everyone.
Some other interesting facts:
- Last month, 10% of our visitors viewed just one page before leaving the site. However, 28% viewed 10 or more, and 10% viewed 20 or more!
- The average user spends more than 5 minutes on our site per visit.
- Fourteen percent of our visitors are on Macs.
That's really just the tip of the iceberg, and again, I'm sharing this in part as a way to get some feedback on how each of you individually use our site. Do you spend more of your time in the forums than our product pages? What do you think we do well online? Where do we fall short? What do you want to see more of?
Please share! As always, we're listening.