2017 Recap of BotList
Hard data from the bot ecosystem
For the TL;DR, check out this Tweetstorm.
Since April 10th, 2016 we set out to become the solution for bot discovery. Our mission has always been helping consumers discover bots which aid in making life easier.
While we want to help consumers, we also set out to assist bot makers by providing tools for growth. It’s our chicken and egg issue that I’ll get into later.
2017 was an incredible year for our growth, but we also had some setbacks and learned some valuable lessons running a bootstrapped startup.
Let’s Get Into the Data
In 2017, BotList.co and chatbots grew increasingly throughout the year. Even though bots are still early on in adoption and there has been some speculation that bots are all hype, our analytics prove otherwise.
While looking at our analytics, know that we adjusted our SEO and website structure for longterm benefits, but took a hit with traffic. (see the annotations)
Our monthly pageviews were scaling quite nicely in the beginning of the year, but it’s difficult to say where they are at now due to the restructuring of our urls, SEO, etc.
Monthly sessions looked pretty amazing in 2017!!! Wish we started with the proper SEO and site structure in the beginning. (ProTip #1: Start off with proper site structure for scalability and SEO in mind)
Here’s our full rundown of site analytics based by quarter for 2017. Another reason for a Q4 drop could be the holidays. 2016 showed similar Q4 analytic drop in traffic.
Even though we had a rough Q4 in 2017, our yearly growth between 2016 –2017 was amazing!!! 😍😍😍😍😍😍
Figured that I would mention our activity on our own Facebook Messenger chatbot. Even though we never really update the bot and spend the time improving the quality, the chatbot gets some serious traffic. Noticing how much traffic we are getting with the bot has shifted our focus on improving the functionality.
Side note: Our Messenger bot is the only chatbot where you can search 19 different platforms for bots.
User Data
- Over 11k Registered Users. (Growing faster now that we have social logins and auto tweet bot’s Twitter accounts so Makers can claim their bot pages.)
- BotList Facebook Page: 4,281 likes
- BotList Labs Facebook Page: 104 likes
- BotList Community Facebook Group: 1,324 members
- BotList Twitter: 4,497 followers
- Newsletter Subscribers: 3,561
Chatbot & Platform Data
While we view some interesting data surrounding chatbots and the platforms that they are on, it’s important to remember that we only approve 6 bots daily and constantly add new platforms to BotList. For example, we just recently started supporting Google Assistant and Microsoft Teams in Q3 & Q4 of 2017.
Side note: We only approve 6 bots per day to focus on providing a quality control over the bots being submitted. So we test and approve all bots that are submitted to BotList.
An interesting piece of data here is that Discord is the 2nd most viewed platform for bots on BotList. Discord is a popular conversational app for gamers, but has recently been used by cryptocurrency communities.
Some takeaways here:
- Bounce rate dropped towards end of the year = more time on pages (This means users want to understand your bot before engaging with it, so spend time on your pages)
- Social Referral needs better distribution. Even though our Messenger bot pushes out a bunch of social content automatically. Improving this Q1 2018
- We had more New Users vs. Returning Users: This will balance out with the Hooked tactics we implemented at the end of 2017. 📈
- Organic Search blew up in 2017. Probably because of better SEO.
- 124% increase in sessions & 138% increase in Users since 2016!!! ❤️
- Discord will dominate in 2018 with conversational bots
- More platforms will be added to BotList
- Amazon & Google will get more popular with voice bots
2018 Roadmap
BotList API: We want to finish a basic version of our API to have a better submission process. This will also benefit us and 3rd party bot building tools like Ben Brown’s Botkit Studios, Chatfuel, ManyChat, Recime, and more. (See a list here)
BotList Analytics Platform: Even though our main focus is to provide discovery for bots, we want to give bot makers better analytics surrounding the consumer side of their chatbots. Currently you can view some pretty amazing stats and privately message reviewers of your bots if you have a Pro account.
BotList Marketplace: We have a very early beta version of a marketplace where you can sell the bots that you’ve created, but we want to provide a way for bot makers to be able to sell templates as well. We will be creating an escrow to make sure the safety of transactions is top priority.
Bot Makers: We would be nothing without our makers and that’s why creating more tools for bot makers is a priority for us. Have something that you’d want to see on BotList??? Let us know it the community here.
BotList & Blockchain: This is a bit of a secret, so you’ll just have to wait and see. 😉
BotList will continue to grow and provide a place to discover bots. But more importantly, we will be focusing more on the community and educating bot makers how to build better bots.
Our hope is that as a community, we can work together and help the bot ecosystem thrive and bring a positive change to the world.
A sustainable world means working together to create prosperity for all. — Jacqueline Novogratz
