10% is normal ratio. There is common and general 90/9/1 ratio where

• 90% of visitors just lurks in the background
• 9% of visitors registers to the community and participates sometimes
• 1% of visitors registers and participates frequently

Based on my experiences, this is pretty fixed ratio. Meaning that during the time, ratio remains same.

But, for some reason, during last months our ratio keep decreasing. It is smaller than 10%.

EDIT: I presume you compare now registered unique visitors vs. guest unique visitors?

@Jef Vanlaer and @revote  I would take these numbers with a pinch of salt to be honest. I briefly explain why here: 

If you have access to the BI Connector you can see this for yourselves with the query I added.

@revote Thanks! I'm indeed comparing registered unique visitors vs. guest unique visitors.

Thanks for sharing this, @rhall . Will definitely keep it in mind!

Yeah I totally understand and agree what you are saying (even though I dont know nothing about BI Connector ). People uses several devices, accepts/denies cookies and so on.

I still stand behind my statement about the 90/9/1 rule. It is “universal” though.

Sorry @revote, I wasn’t questioning your percentages  When you have a public community which is indexed by search engines, you get a lot of traffic from that. In a previous life I was running a community for a product which used Java. The number of visitors we got for standard Java errors, straight from Google, were ludicrous. Anyone who got a NullPointerException with their code ended up visiting, desperately trying to find an answer 

Yeah, public community “lives” because all the traffic from search engines

@Jef Vanlaer asked what happens for the ratio during the time. In other hand you get active members and hopefully you get them more and more all the time. But same time you get more traffic, more guest visitors from search engines, and that’s why ratio ~ same all the time. 

My community is a fairly well established support focused community with really high and super effective SEO (and very much public). There’s no reason for someone to register for community or login to community, unless they want to ask a question, reply to a thread, or like a post.

With that being said: 

• first month live was 34%
• last month was 1.8%
• lifetime ratio is 2.6%

I’ve got wildly mixed feelings on the 90/9/1 rule. It’s a good baseline to start with, but most communities will quickly deviate and find their own specific baseline based on business objectives, desired user behavior, etc.

Thank you for sharing those numbers @jillian.bejtlich. My assumption was that the numbers could be different for support focused vs. best practice communities, for example, indeed. It would be nice to see some more numbers from other Communities to see where the 90/9/1 rule applies and where it doesn't. 

Sorry but I have two questions:

I am curious so can I ask about the ratio - how much traffic comes from search engines and how much there is direct traffic? Users or sessions.

What do you exactly mean with this “live”?

@revote I have answers… sort of!

Since the native dashboards don’t give us any good data on referrals, we’re kind of using multiple sources to throw an educated guess out there. From what I can tell, the majority of our traffic (+90%) is from search engines. This makes sense as it’s our strategy. We’re hyperfocused on deflection by being the right knowledge at the right time and right place, and focus a ton of time on improving gaps in search, release readiness, and other proactive or reactive content efforts.

As for live, @Jef Vanlaer had mentioned “About 1 month after going live” so I wanted to provide a 1:1 metric for him. We went live in September 2023 and public in October 2023, albeit quietly. Fully splashy launch was in January 2024.

Thanks. 90%, that´s huge! I havent ever heard about such high number. Nice job with your SEO, impressive

Gothcha. Thanks for clarifying. You have birthday there soon

I think your SEO is so huge, that it decreases your registered unique visitors vs. guest unique visitors -ratio. When you went live ratio was bigger, less traffic from search engines.