Ask HN: are my conversion ratios great...or shite?

[resdirector]

* For every 100 people who view my front page, 60 try my app.

* For every 100 people who try my app, 33 give it a reasonable work-out.

* For every 100 people who give it a reasonable work-out, 5 people become users.

* And we don't have a paying customer yet.

Is this great, mediocre or shite? (my app is www.folderboy.com/index.htm?f=cv)

If you run a web app, what is your app, and what are your conversion rates? And where do you source most of your traffic from?

EDIT: only just started promoting thru social networking sites, and an Ask HN post. So only around 400-500 page views so far.

[michael_dorfman]

First of all, congratulations-- looks like you've got a nice site and product.

Second, even more congratulations-- the fact that you are measuring the CR the way you are from the beginning shows some understanding of the process.

I think that trying to make judgments based on 500 page views is premature-- right now, it is good to figure out your baseline numbers, so that you can start doing A/B testing to improve the various ratios. If I were in your shoes, I'd try to spend a couple weeks trying to increase the traffic, and then go to work on the CRO.

But: getting one serious user out of every 100 pageviews sounds like an excellent start to me.

The lack of paying customers isn't a big surprise, based upon your pricing scheme: there's no incentive for people to start paying until they reach the limits you've imposed (1000 notes or 500MB), and it's going to take your early users some time to get there.

The product looks slick-- personally, I have a bunch of OneNote notebooks in my Dropbox, which gives me the same effect in a satisfactory way, so I'm not motivated to switch to Folderboy-- but it looks like a service I could easily pitch to others.

One small thing: when your resources permit, you might want to hire a voice actor to re-do the YouTube video. I think it would add a "professional touch".

[RiderOfGiraffes]

Clickable: http://www.folderboy.com/index.htm?f=cv

Shiny landing page, doesn't suit me, but I'm regularly referred to as "bizarre" by people who watch me react with computers, so that's no surprise. Are you doing A/B testing on your layout? I'd change the

> FolderBoy allows you to jot down your ideas and find them again with search-as-you-type.

... to say "Jot down anything - find instantly with search-as-you-type."

But as I say, don't trust my judgement on this - do the testing. Tinker, tinker, tinker, tinker, with measurements.

Anyway, for my own personal understanding, I've scaled up the ratios you've given to see what 10,000 page views would produce

  10,000 @ 60% gives 6,000 try-outs
   6,000 @ 33% gives 2,000 reasonable work-outs
   2,000 @  5% gives   100 users.

So 1% of your views turn into users. I'd've thought that was quite good, but I have no experience, so that's a priori reasoning, not the voice of "Been there, done that."

And good luck!

[bkrausz]

I have a small ecommerce site that has an ~1% conversion rate. If I'm reading your post correctly you have about a 1% user conversion rate, so I would say you're average based on my dataset of 1 other site ;).

You really don't know what your conversions are yet though. I'd say wait another week if you want to get an idea of your actual conversion rate, possibly much longer if you have a long sales cycle. My site tends to have a very short time-to-buy, so it's much easier to get an idea for these numbers.

[cperciva]

Depends on the traffic. The conversion rate I get for people who google for "Tarsnap" is about 10x higher than the conversion rate I get for people following links from my blog, which is about 10x higher than the conversion rate I got from Google Adwords.

[resdirector → cperciva]

Cheers. Yeah, sorry, should have mentioned "not statistically significant". We've only just started promoting: so around 500 page views.

[cperciva → resdirector]

Statistical significance is certainly an issue, but not the issue I was referring to. I should have said "depends on the type of traffic".

You'll get a much better conversion rate on clicks resulting from your users saying "hey, resdirector wrote this really cool app" than you get from you saying "Ask HN: Please review my app".

As a general rule, sites which produce more traffic tend to have much lower conversion rates, unfortunately.

[resdirector]

Thanks for your comments, guys...I'll reply and thank individually in the morning. Cheers.

[Raphael]

Numbers look good from here.