Site owners: Where do members come from?
 

Just a question that it's going around my head since a while now... on average, how many joins do you get from different sources (Search engine, link exchange, other sites you own, affiliates, tgp, etc.) ?

For us, it's something like this:

Our network: 40%
Old customers: 30%
Affiliates: 20%
Search Engine: 10%

yeah i would agree with you. nothing beats good in house traffic!

Stupid question I know but how do you measure the figures? How do you tell exactly where each member comes from? I would be really interested to know so that maybe I can learn something.

The only stat I can give at present is that

22% are members via affiliates
78% are from all other sources.

It wasn't easy, honestly. Maybe because of my lack of experience... anyway this is what i do:

- After a successful join, member is sent to a special page, not linked anywhere else, that has an immediate automatic reload. The page just says "all went fine, finalizing the membership" but anyway he doesn't even see that as in the header i put <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=http://www.MYDOMAIN.com/">
- That page has, as every other page of my site, Google Analytics installed
- In google analytics i create a Goal, named "subscription", set it as "regular expression" and write the full name of the special page in there

That's it. After that in many Google Analytics reports i can use "goals" to see everything (almost) about each and every subscription to the site.

I posted the same on GFY and, basically, they answered something like "it's a waste of time to do that thing, it's just because you are a newbie"...very true...but well... i still think when you have a small budget, it helps to know where money comes from....

Another thing to keep in mind: we don't get thousands of members each month, so i don't know if this method would still work (Google Analytics is well known to don't give exact numbers but just a part of the real ones)