User blog comment:Toughpigs/My Home -- new feature launches on Wednesday/@comment-10370-20091002172914

Hi folks -- The My Home feature has been up for a little over a week now, and we've been watching the stats very closely to see how people are using it. I know that folks here are interested, so I'll share some of what we've seen so far.

We've been looking at the click-through rate, to see what has been catching people's interest. Overall, 28% of the views to My Home have resulted in people clicking on one of the new features. The Activity feed is the most popular (22% click-through), followed by the Hot Spots (4%) and the Contributions list (2%). That average has been slowly going up as people are getting used to My Home -- going from 24% on the first day to 31% yesterday.

We're also evaluating the primary goal of this feature, which is to make brand-new contributors come back and edit more. We're currently tracking a set of new editors who started contributing after the My Home launch, comparing them to another set that we tracked over the summer.

The hypothesis that we're testing is that My Home makes the site more "sticky". It's easier for new editors to see what's happening in the community, and therefore easier for them to find ways to help out. If that works, then new contributors who start this week should make more edits, and should be more likely to come back to the wiki later and keep contributing.

That analysis is going to take at least six weeks to complete. It's too early to say what the final results will be, but what we're seeing so far looks promising.

A secondary goal for the feature -- more of a hope, really -- was that My Home might help to motivate active contributors to make more edits on the wiki. So far, that seems to be happening too. Again, it's too early to announce real numbers, but we're following it very closely.

The other thing that we're tracking is how people end up on the My Home page. There are four ways that people can get to My Home, and this is how it breaks down so far: Redirect from name.wikia.com (71% of My Home views), creating a new account (14%), the My Home link at the top right (8%), and the My Home tab on the user masthead (7%).

The majority of views on My Home are coming from the redirect, which was what we expected. (It's also likely that many of the clicks on the link and the masthead tab are coming from people who were first exposed to the feature through the redirect.) Adding a link on the skin usually doesn't lead to a lot of exposure for a new feature -- there are lots of links, and a new one can get lost.

One more thing that we've been looking at is the number of extra clicks on the wiki logo -- basically, seeing how many people end up on My Home, and really wanted to see the main page, so they click the logo to get there. So far, about 7% of the views on My Home lead to people clicking the logo to get to the main page. We're comparing that number to the 28% of views that lead to clicks on one of the features, and we'll keep watching to see how that changes over the next month.

So that's where we're at a week in -- sorry for the long, math-heavy post, but hopefully somebody found this interesting. We're listening to everybody's comments and thoughts, and we'll also keep watching these numbers to see how people are using the new feature.