6zap is a Web 2.0 Email, Calendar, Contacts and File sharing application. During the last 10 days we’ve seen a nice increase in traffic.
Before I get to the traffic spike, I’d like to point out a few things.
- All these numbers are still quite small. The most visitors we got to 6zap.com is 2000 a day.
- Traffic to 6zap has been increasing at a nice pace even before the recent spike. As you can see the left hand side of the graph is growing.
- We’re not getting significant traffic from any single site anymore, yet traffic is still more than double what it was before the spike. This is really important! If you get a spike and then things fall back to the level they were before, it means that people aren’t sticking around to use your application. Driving more traffic in won’t help until you solve this issue.
So what triggered this traffic? We submitted our app to two sites, KillerStartups and Feedmyapp within a few days of each other, and it happened that they both published the review around the same time. That’s it, that was the magic. From there a number of other publications picked things up and did their own reviews. Check out the full list. The list includes reviews in English, French, Japanese, Italian Spanish German and more. This encouraged us to move faster on our translation efforts and the next release of 6zap, coming out in the next couple of weeks will include a translation module.
The importance of analytics
We watch our analyitics quite carefully and use several tools to keep track of the progress. We use Google analytics to analyze traffic and trends.
This image, for instance, show the rank of various sites that brought in visitors.
It’s crucial to figure out which is the actual page that sent the visitors to your web site so you can read what was said and possibly comment, but it’s a little convoluted in the Google analytics interface:
- Click on Traffic Sources
- Click on Referring Sites
- Click on the domain you’re interested in, for instance genbeta.com in the 3rd position above.
- Now click on the little icon to the left of the URL and it’ll open the page in a new tab/window.
We also use awstats which analyzes the raw log data. The interface is not as nice, but it has the advantage of being able to look at all pages and tell you things like the amount of bandwidth your site generated, 404 page not found, etc.
The last tool in our arsenal is a collection of scripts that spit out data from the database. They tell us how many people signed up per day, how many people logged in every day, etc. After all, all the traffic is useless if people don’t sign up and use the application.
While we got the coverage on the various sites, we also got quite a few tweets.That helped but not nearly as much as you’d think. I suspect that it’s a signal to noise ratio issue. On one hand it’s easy to get mentioned on Twitter so we got quite a few mentions, on the other hand, it’s quite easy to get mentioned on Twitter so we got lost in the other few billions tweets.
Moving forward
At the end of the day, all these social networking strategies can help you only if you have a good product and keeps evolving. We expect to have our next release ready in 2-3 weeks which includes these major new features:
- Workgroups: the ability to share contacts, calendars and files with anyone in your group
- Notes: the ability, not only to create notes, but to attach them to a contact or email
- Translations into languages other than English. Please let us know if you’re interested in helping translate 6zap.
At that point we’ll go back to all of the sites above and mention all these new features. We’ll also go to the foreign sites and ask for help in translating to other languages.
Conclusion
- Things move very quickly in the Web 2.0 world and it’s important to have your finger on the pulse.I haven’t heard about Killerstatups and Feedmyapp until pretty recently. Feedmyapp is growing fast and Killerstartups has more than half a million visitors a month. Clearly, they’re becoming an important resource both for users and startups.
- You have to keep an eye on your analytics. It can be as little as 10 minutes a day, but keep an eye on where people are coming from and check any articles that are written about you.
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6zap: http://twitter.com/6zap
InvoiceMore March 24th, 2009 at 14:33