Number of CC Users versus Number of solution users

Hey @JayS - let me share a few thoughts, and hopefully other folks will chime-in too.  I’m generally sceptical of most community benchmark numbers.  Every community is totally different - different product, different audience, different use cases, different strategy, different ecosystem, etc…  So when we take an average of a bunch of communities, that number may not necessarily be a great indication of what ‘good’ looks like in your situation.  I’ve seen SaaS communities with 5% of customers active in the community on a monthly basis, and others where it’s closer to 50% - both of those may be excellent results depending on the unique situation of the community.

With that aside, there are some helpful best practices we can fall back on.  A classic is the 30-10-10 rule.  This one has been around a long time, and it basically states that in a 30 day period you can expect 10% of visitors who see a link to your community to go there, and 10% of them to actually register and post something.  In practice this rule is never actually going to be accurate.  Your results are likely to differ significantly - again, as every community is different.  But it does give you a decent baseline just to start with.  So if you have 100,000 users interacting with your product and website over a month, based on this best practice example you might initially expect 10,000 visitors and 1,000 members who post at least once.  Again, your actual results are likely to vary, possibly wildly, from this example.  :) But it’s a starting point.  And once your community has been live for a while, you can baseline off of your own numbers and build from there.

There’s another old classic bast practice - the 90:9:1 rule.  It suggests that a community will generally have 90% visitors who just read something and leave, 9% who register and interact and 1% very active users / superusers.  Real-world results, again, will vary significantly but it also provides a good initial baseline and is a good reminder that it’s normal for most visitors to just visit, and for only a small group of users to be extremely active.  

Some benchmarks that are interesting, in my opinion, are the ones that touch on ‘health’.  So for example, the % of topics that get no reply.  That’s a universal metric that I’d suggest every new community owner to closely track.  Anything under 5% is typically fairly acceptable.  Much higher than that, and it’s cause for taking action.  Further examples are the % of questions with a best answer, the % of best answers by a non-employee and I could name a few more.  These are all actionable and universal metrics.  

Most important, in my opinion, is developing your own baseline and setting a realistic target for your community based on that.  Seeing benchmark examples from other communities is interesting but understanding our own numbers is far more important.

Thank you, @Kenneth R for the quick and comprehensive response! 

I think this is a great starting point for us to consider, and I look forward to any other responses.

Jay

@Kenneth R  Thank you for the feedback. In our current use case, the 90:9:1 rule seems to apply as we initially launched as a passive knowledge base. 

Is there a way to track the registered users and count of visitors each month? I feel like we are missing some report on content “view”.

Thanks.

Hi @JPKelliher yes you have the total registered and unregistered visitor counts in the Analytics > Audience dashboard.  That’s a great high-level view of traffic / views. 

A great place to dive a little deeper is the Analytics > Content dashboard where you have a number of filters you can apply at the top.  The Popular topics and Popular categories tables at the bottom of that dashboard are very useful as they give you views per individual article or category along with other data like number of replies.