Much ado about Alexa rankings lately. It’s time to take a hard look at developing an industry standard for ranking dating sites. This is a first pass, hopefully it can be refined over time with feedback and turn out to be something helpful to the industry, advertisers and consumers.
The dating industry, and one could argue that website in general, need a ranking system that is resilient enough to react to changing traffic inflation tactics like spyware, toolbars, link farms and other more uncommon methods on the horizon.
One that takes into consideration the myriad sites out there, paid, free, inexpensive, credit-based, subscription based. Long duration members vs. short, high value vs. low. Getting nookie vs. getting married.
A question to you then. What are the metrics you would use to develop a ranking system that fairly and accurately represents the entire online dating industry?
Some example metrics:
# visitors
# members
# paying members (customers)
% conversion rate
membership duration
customer satisfaction
customer success
Before deciding on the metrics, we need to think about the overall goals of a ranking system. Why is a dating site’s Alexa, Comscore or Hitwise rank so important?
An Excel spreadsheet from your CFO and another from the membership director can give you a good look into how your company is doing. Does it really matter if a competitor has N number more profiles than you do?
As long as you’re making money and growing your business and delivering what the customer expects, what’s the big deal? Consumers most certainly don’t judge their decision solely on traffic ranking. They don’t say, “this site is free, but it’s large and I like the ads, so I’m going to join it.” They watch tv, listen to radio ads, surf the Interweb and ask their friends for advice.
If the industry is infatuated with traffic rank, to what ends?
Pre-money valuation?
Preparing to sell your membership list?
Advertising?
Marketing?
Sale of company?
More eyeballs = more ad dollars. However, more members does not necessarily mean better customer experience.
Small niche site with high-value members = more ad dollars.
How would Userplane’s ad network value different sites? If I understand correctly, at the moment it’s a run-of-network deal, in the future it will be more targeted, at least one would hope.
As an advertiser, things are shifting. I used to think I wanted 50,000 eyeballs. What I really want are the 500 that matter most, that are ready to buy. The high-value eyeballs.
Free sites are made up of relatively low-value members. They are not so serious about dating, mostly giving it a try. Arguable point, yes. Let’s have at it. Free dating sites rely on advertising, it’s all about the eyeballs. Free sites like Plentyoffish and WebDate make decent money off of advertising, at least that is what I am led to believe.
What about geographic ranking? 500,000 members. Whatever. How many are in my aggregated zip code area? Dating sites would never publish this kind of information, it’s too transparent. Consumers would love it. The old “N number of people online” is only useful if you have chat, otherwise who cares if/when people are visiting the site?
Mid-priced subscription-based sites are geared more towards serious daters, although a good portion are casual daters.
Some subscription-based sites try to undercut the competition on price. This hardly ever works. They end up with low-value members. A certain slice of the online dating demographic use price as a filter. Not enough sites leverage this. Price point is a metric as well. Value-per-dollar would be an interesting way to measure a site, but too much trouble to figure out.
If Site A charges $9.95 per month and has 500,000 member and Site B charges $24.95 and has 34,000, which site should be ranked higher? It’s a quality vs. quantity argument.
How do you define satisfaction or success? Success for the dating site company is rarely aligned with the goals of it’s members. Customer satisfaction is not something we hear about often enough in the industry.
If you’re a top 10 site, your popularity is based on the total amount of active profiles and paying members and customer satisfaction. [Insert discussion about definition of active profiles.]
More members tends to attract more members.
High quality members bring additional high-quality members.
Define high-quality members. 450,000 free members means absolutely nothing to an advertiser, it’s just a number, and they have no way of judging it past what you tell them about your membership demographics. You’re never honest with them anyway, because you would never get their money if you were, and they know that.
Is a dating site “better” because people vote with their wallets and stick around longer?
“I’ve been on this dating site for 6 months and I can’t find anyone decent.”
You have extended the lifetime of the customer, yet have failed to satisfy their objective. The promise has been broken, unwritten or not. And your site gets the reward of getting ranked higher than a site that does it’s job faster and more efficiently.
Is a higher-percentage of long term customers a good or a bad thing?
One would think from a consumer perspective that high churn rate is a good thing.
Do you think people actually enjoy the online dating experience? That number is probably a lot lower that we would like to think.
How can a dating site improve the experience for members and extend the duration of the membership? What metrics can we use to gauge how effective a dating site is? Relying on # of marriages is one way to look at it, but not the only way.
There’s a lot more to this discussion, like I said, this is a starting point. I’m interested to hear your thoughts. Maybe I’m way off on this, maybe all the industry need is Alexa and Hitwise, why air the dirty laundry or bother self-policing or becoming more transparent when things are going along just fine as they are?
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