Analytics, Landing Pages and A/B Testing

Analytics about last post

First let me share with you some analytics from my first post.

The post was published 10 days ago and I got 104 visits and 70 reads. I’ll take a deeper look at the post analytics in another post but here are the main take aways:

• Medium has an interesting metric: Reads.
  This metric represents the number of users that opened the article and ‘most probably’ read it. I guess this represents the interest of the users in the article and can be used as a metric o effectiveness.
  What Medium lacks is a better way of drilling this down by referrers. We have the number of views per referrer but not the number of reads. This could give us an idea of which referrer is the most effective.
• I have shared the post on LinkedIn, Hacker News, Twitter and Reddit (both on /r/leanstartup and /r/agile)
• I used as a ‘Reach’ metric: the percentage of the followers that has viewed the shared post on the network it was shared (or number of subscribers of the subreddit in the case of reddit). Although not entirely true, the idea is that a percentage higher than 100% means that the post is starting to have a reach outside your network. Please feel free to share your thoughts on this as I know some people might disagree on it.
• Using this metric, LinkedIn is the network where the posts have a bigger reach. In my case there was 60% reach — or about 542 views with 899 1st degree connections. Interestingly, I had 11 new people reaching for a connection and an inquire for availability for a new job opportunity.

Landing page and A/B Testing

Before creating the landing page I started to check the availability of a domain for the ‘Spoiler me’ brand. It turns out that there is already a Spoil me page that does exactly what I was thinking of offering. After some search with other names the project was renamed to [SpoilerAlert] and a domain bought.

For the landing page I looked at several services I found in this Quora post. I settled with LaunchRock as it was the only one that offered a free version without a time limit. The page was created but I ended up not sharing it.

I have been thinking about user engagement on a app like this and how to improve it. My thinking is that this is one of those apps a user installs and soon forgets it or don’t even opens it. When would I open such an app? Before going to see the movie? With friends at a party just to fool around? Or would I play a trivia type of game based on spoilers? You know what would give me an idea of which option would be most successful? Yeah, you’re right, I should A/B test it.

I could just collect sign ups with a general page and then ask for feedback via email but 1 most people would not reply the email, and 2 sometimes people act differently than what they say they would. So, next step is to build an A/B test on the landing page to assess what type of app would bring more sign ups.

Since LaunchRock doesn’t allow you to build A/B tests, I’m considering either building this test on my own and host it myself or pay a couple of months of a service that has this feature built in. However the average price per month for having this feature is $60 per month, so I’ll do it myself and take the opportunity to learn how to implement these tests.