Discussion forums engagement ratio?

dRD

Member
I've been trying to search around the web some kind of ballpark figures and/or comparisons to play with, but so far, haven't found any.

Thus, wanted to ask the community here -- what is your forums' engagement ratio? As defined by "how many unique users post at least one message each month vs. your monthly unique visitors?" (got my unique visitors data from G Analytics, unique posters data from database).

And if any of you have switched from other forum platforms to xenForo recently, can you look back your data and say if the figures have changed -- one way or another?

Because, for me, the matter of choosing the forum platform is also very much about how well it engages the random (say, from google) users to participate in discussions.

Our engagement ratio has gone down for years and years. For our English language forum, it was back in 01/2008 at 0.31% and in 10/2013 has dropped to 0.07% (gradual decline) and I hope that the switch to xenForo would turn the trend upwards again.

Our Finnish forums don't fare much better, having had the engagement ratio of 0.75% back in 01/2008 and currently (10/2013) stand at 0.42% (fair enough, drop is only about ~40% whereas the English forums' drop is ~80%).

Both sites have had millions of monthly visitors for over a decade now, but the decline in posts have now started to show also in terms of traffic, as there's less and less new content to read, thus, fewer visitors from search engines, etc.
 
This usually happens when you don't create unique content to your users and just leave them the forum to discuss with each other.
 
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