Quote:
Originally Posted by Eman - PG
jpv you're doing well no doubt about it. Retention is a funny thing, it's probably the most misunderstood thing in the business by most webmasters. Numbers are easily skewed by sending more traffic than the historic average used to grab those rebills, analyzing too short periods, too long periods and so on. It's almost impossible to compare the retention of two paysites unless you're sending so much traffic evenly to both sites to make the noise statistically insignificant. The more traffic you get, the closer one's retention gets to the industry average.
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I agree and disagree...
I agree that if you have a very high sales month then the next month will naturally have many rebills. And if that next month has low sales then it looks like your site gets many rebills compared to initials. I thought this would come up in this thread and that is why I made sure I did not take advatage of skewing the numbers... Actually I can't do this because my sales have been steady over the past couple years... even going up gradually. I don't have months when sales are huge compared to prior months. My sales have been very steady. So no the numbers are not skewed.
Something else that should be noted... My initial numbers inculde almost 10% NON RECURRING transactions. So to be fair I could lower my initial transactions by 10% to show the true recurring numbers which would be $114 per sale from recurring alone. The non recurring inital transactions bring the average $ per sale down but the recurring transactions are very strong.
I don't agree that the more traffic you get, the closer one's retention gets to the industry average... unless your site is average. The simple fact is people will stay longer at a site they like rather than a site they don't like. If I push more traffic to my site it will not bring down retention.
BUT... affiliates can make a difference here and many programs probably have seen this... When you have lots of affiliates who run wild it WILL bring down retention. It was common practice and still is for affiliates to use non-exclusive content to promote a paysite even if that paysite does not have that content! How would a customer feel after going to a gallery with some video clips they like and all around that clips is ads for a paysite... the member joins that site but that site does not have the full video the member was hoping to see! So yes... if you send more traffic by misleading customers then your retention will come down. But, you don't need to mislead people to gain sales. I never will and I will never let my affiliates do that so my retention should not drop to an "average".