In the interests of transparency and accountability the CR growth team will be publishing basic monthly analytics reports for both the Cyber Republic & Elastos websites to the community. We provide a thorough review and summary of Cyber Republic analytics only.

The purpose of these reports is to increase awareness and understanding of the work we do, challenges we have, progress we’re making and wins/losses along the way and invite the community to add their expertise and talents where they can. By having more feedback, ideas and contribution you can help us increase the velocity of progress and the accuracy of our work so we can introduce and on-board more users to the safer, more complete internet being built on the Elastos ecosystem.

These monthly reports are part of the Growth Marketing Proposal that was accepted by Cyber Republic Council (CRC) in Oct ‘18. This is a first monthly report (Nov 1 – Nov 30).

We welcome all constructive feedback and comments on the Cyber Republic Sub-reddit.

CyberRepublic.org Analytics

Summary

Wins:

Our initial few weeks have been a success so far across the board and it’s been pleasing to see increases all around on the basic measurements not only on the website but also across our social media platforms.

We are focusing heavily on user research, increasing analytics and feedback mechanisms within the website and social media channels to gather data on what content and experiences are working and not working and will continue to iterate.

Challenges:

Our data suggests there remains significant legacy challenges with the:

U/X and navigational structure of the website which impacts all major goals (eg. signup, task creation and applica

tion, project creation and application)

and applica tion, project creation and application) Mobile formatting

Severe lack of content and audience engagement with 99% of audience being male and between the ages of 25-45. The lack of reach and engagement for women is appalling and needs to be prioritised

Traffic split between different domains and sub-domains (blog) – which means our data is actually under representing the increases in traffic and engagement.

Lack of meta tagging for search and social

Action:

We will be strongly advocating for a shift in focus to the priority areas of:

Improving content

Improving navigation

Improving mobile formatting

Rebranding and new U/I and U/X experience

Unite all traffic on the same domain

Improve meta tagging for search and social

More short, digestable video content

Overview of This Month

Now let us have a look at what happened on our Cyber Republic website this month.

Figure 1. New Users (left y-axis) and Users (right y-axis) per day

Figure 2. Users by time of day ; Figure 3. Percentage of all sessions by country

If we look at Figure 1., we see that the curves for New Users and Total Users follow the same trend. However, that is not the thing that stands out the most. The first thing we notice looking at this graph are two big spikes in number of (New) Users. Both spikes coincide with the token releases Elastos underwent on the 5th and the 20th of this month. These events were met with a lot of controversy yet they brought a lot of curious individuals to the Cyber Republic site. A sharp drop in Users took place after the first event back to previous levels but after the second event the site traffic increased, indicating a potential increase of interest. The real cause behind this new interest remains unclear.

Figure 2. shows us a heatmap of when Users most frequently visit the site. The highest traffic occurs early in the week, with peaks on Monday around noon and Tuesday evening. From Thursday evening until Sunday people are less interested in spending their time on the Cyber Republic website.

Figure 3. shows us the percentage of all Sessions initiated for the top 5 countries this month. Note that it seems that the U.S. is the most active country on the site yet that is very misleading. The U.S. should not be compared to other countries in term of statistics but rather to other continents due to its size and population. Doing just that, we can see in Figure 4. that Europe actually brought the most interested, New Users this month, even considering that the U.S. has now been categorized under Americas together with Canada, Mexico and South-America. As a clarification, the Bounce Rate is the percentage of new users who arrive on the site and leave the site again without performing any action.

Figure 4. New Users and Bounce Rate by Continent

Another interesting thing to look at is where these New Users come from. Figure 5. shows us that the biggest source of New Users are Referrals, followed by Direct source, Organic Search, (Other) and Social. Most will not know what this means so let me add a clarification for these terms. Referral means the user clicked on a hyperlink directing to the site, from another site. Direct means the user typed in the site URL directly in the URL bar, used a bookmark/favourite or a link within a document. Organic Search means the user came on the site by searching for it in a search engine (e.g. Google, Yahoo, Bing, …). Other means sources outside the Default Channel Grouping which in this case is the social media campaign by the CR Growth Team. Social means from social media sources (e.g.Twitter, Reddit, Youtube, Facebook, …).

Figure 5. Source of New Users and Avg. Session Duration for each source

Figure 6. Primary sources of New Users and Bounce Rate

Figure 6. gives us deeper insight in the sources of those New Users. Elastos.org accounts for 94% of the non-social Referral traffic, followed by coinmarketcap.com, which added the Cyber Republic website only a few days ago. Organic search is mostly, yet not exclusively, originating from Google. From all the social media, Twitter is the most effective gathering interested New Users, with a Bounce Rate of only 2%, while Telegram (t.co) brought in quite some New Users as well yet it had the highest Bounce Rate.

Due to the split in domain name between the Cyber Republic Blog and the main website, the analytics have been split as well. This is why we look at them separately here.

Figure 7. CR Blog New Users (left y-axis) and Users (right y-axis) per day

Most noticeable is that when we look at Figure 7., we can see three big spikes in (New) Users. One spike the 12th, one on the 19th and one on the 26th. These dates coincide exactly with the release of the Cyber Republic weekly reports. Two smaller bumps can be seen on the 9th and on the 15th, each coinciding with the release of an article, the introduction of our new translation manager and the open letter to the Web Foundation respectively.

Figure 8. Cyber Republic Blog Sessions and Average Session Duration per Country

Also the audience is different, with Asia/China taking the number 1 spot as the most active and interested Country/Continent (Figure 8 & 9). We can thank our new translation manager, Wang Hao, for translation all the articles in Chinese and bringing our Chinese community members to the Cyber Republic.

Figure 9. Cyber Republic Blog Sessions and Bounce Rate per Continent

Figure 10. Cyber Republic Blog Source of New Users and Average Session Duration per User

In Figure 10. we can see that the majority of the New Users is coming from the Direct source, which in this case means from people browsing through the Cyber Republic site and clicking on the Blog tab. The second biggest source of New Users, accounting for 21% of the traffic, comes from the Social media platforms while Referrals from elanews.net, news.elastos.org and web.telegram.org accounted for the remaining 3%.

Lastly Figure 11. shows us which Social platforms were the most effective at gathering New Users to the Cyber Republic Blog and their Bounce Rate. Telegram was by far the most effective, followed by Facebook, Reddit and Twitter. We notice a very high Bounce Rate compared to the Cyber Republic site. As we described above, the Bounce Rate indicates the percentage of Users leaving the page without performing any action. Considering the reason of most of these Users, referred by Social media links, to visit that specific page is to read the article, a higher percentage of Bounce Rate is expected as they would leave the page without performing an action after finishing reading.

Figure 11. Cyber Republic Blog New Users and Bounce rate from Social Media Sources

Comparison With Last Month

All these numbers and plots for November are very interesting but we of course also want to know if all the efforts at bringing in more, interested users through site development, marketing campaigns and community effort actually paid off. To do this, we compare the data from November with the data from October. The Cyber Republic Growth Team started their campaign officially on the 1st of November, yet any changes in site statistics compared to last month is a combinations of multiple factors and cannot be attributed solely to their efforts. That being said, multiple statistics clearly show the positive influence of their campaign as shown below.

Figure 12. Change in Users, Sessions, Bounce Rate and Session Duration compared between October and November. The solid line shows the number of users each day while the dashed line shows the number of users of each respective day in October.

Figure 12. shows a general improvement compared to last month. A 128% increase in Users, a 147% increase in number of Sessions started, a decrease of 81% in Bounce Rate and an increase of 98% in Session Duration. The increase in Users and Sessions indicate more traffic on the site while a decrease in Bounce Rate and an increase in Session Duration indicate that the users are generally more interested in the site, performing actions before leaving and spending more time browsing through the site.

One last figure we will show in this report is Figure 13., which illustrates the difference in acquisition of (New) Users and their behaviour between October and November. The left bar graph shows the difference in Users in November (Blue) and October (Orange) while the right bar graph shows the difference in Bounce Rate. Reminder, Other means in this case the social campaign by the CR Growth Team, which only began around the 1st of November explaining the huge increase, but also means that Social and Other can be seen as one which puts Social Media impact in third place, above Organic Search.

Figure 13. Illustration of the difference in Acquisition and Behaviour of Users from different sources between October (Orange) and November (Blue).

Conclusion

Overall, this month was a complete success across the board. New Users are flowing in from all the different sources and in general they stay and spend more time on the site than last month. Even though we can be excited about these numbers, we must keep our feet on the floor. The numbers indicate that we are making progress yet they are skewed by the two peeks in users on the 5th and the 20th of November and the fact that this is the first month of our efforts which generally shows the biggest improvement, in the future the changes may not be this dramatic. This is only the beginning and we have a long way ahead of us but these results give us the confidence to continue to do our work and help Elastos and the Cyber Republic rise.

Last but not least, we would like to thank all the Cyber Republic members that come onto our site, looked around, signed up, formed teams, performed tasks, helped others and in general contributed to making this community a reality. Let us continue building the future together!

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