MyColts community forming

Spent the weekend watching to birth of our new social network for Colts fans (See it here).

Overall, the site performed fairly well. No major malfunctions that I’m aware of, but plenty of work left to do. We’re still effectively in beta mode, gathering input all day long from users who have found the site.

So far we’ve seen about 500 register for the system. Since we got our Omniture code working yesterday, and just for fun, I took a sneak peek at our traffic stats on mycolts versus colts.com:

My Colts stats from yesterday:
Unique visitors: 852
Total Page views: 17,447
PV per visitor: 20

Colts.com stats from yesterday:
Unique visitors: 19,910
Total Page views: 103,380
PV per visitor: 5

It makes sense that the page views per visit would be higher on the social net. These numbers are about what we expected to see. Hopefully, the registered users will continue to grow. We have no idea how large the userbase will get, but we hope to reach 50,000 registered users with at least 15,000 ACTIVE users this season. There’s no science behind these numbers, just guessing.

We haven’t done ANY promotion for MyColts yet except one small link off Colts.com. We wanted to let the site come to life more gradually this first week or two just to make sure the application and infrastructure are in good working order. We’ll plan some heavy promotion off Colts.com and through E mail in the near future. We’ll also run some contests to get attention.

Aside from total numbers of users in the system, we also want to pay attention to users’ click paths. On Colts.com, the home page is by far the most popular page. It generates 35% of all page views on the site. Yesterday on MyColts, the home page only generated 5.6% of all page views. Profile pages were the most often viewed (15%), followed by MyDashboard (11%), which is a user control panel. These numbers are encouraging as they indicate that people are exploring the site and checking out the other users, which is what we expect to happen.

Here’s my profile page:

Traffic in the social net should be much less centralized or concentrated on a few pages than on colts.com. Because of this reality, we’ve decided to sell our banner ads on mycolts on a pure CPM basis. Since there is no home page to clamor for, our sponsors’ programs will be based entirely on AD IMPRESSIONS, that is, how many times their ads are served. We haven’t done this (completely) on Colts.com, so this will be an interesting learning process both for our sponsors and our sales staff alike.