Why is our conversion rate so low?

Question

Site                          Visits/day  Users     200+ users       Questions
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
gaming.stackexchange.com          15,004  6,279   490 (54/day)  4,654 (20/day)
askubuntu.com                     14,771  9,152   479 (80/day)  6,645 (49/day)

Why do we have more visitors than all other SE 2.0 sites (not for long, though) and yet have more trouble turning visitors in contributors? Is it a problem in the first place? If so, what can we do to fix it?

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I know, I know, the parallel isn't really fair.

We didn't sell our souls to corporations. We don't have a top level domain name -- but to be fair, if we did get to have one we wouldn't know what it would be. We don't have an existing, successful forum linking people our way. Still, it doesn't explain the divide.

I think the main difference is that when people have trouble in game they tend to assume it's their fault, not the game's. Especially for certain puzzles, there's a certain shame in asking. "Look mah, I'm too stupid for this. I'll ask this so others don't have to look stupid."

...or is there more to it than that?

Answer 1

I think you're underestimating the value of an existing community like the Ubuntu one. They have an existing community and just now are using a Q&A site, that is a huge advantage compared to us.

I would guess that we have a far greater percentage of visitors from search engines than other SE2 sites. Many other sites are mainly visited by people from other SE sites, those are also much more likely to contribute. Getting people to contribute who have no prior connection to any SE site is much more difficult.

I don't think we can force the issue in any way, we just have to be patient. Even if our conversion rate is bad, the relatively high number of visits provides us with a big pool of users to recruit. We just have to convince them that it is worth the effort, the best way to do that is to have a big archive of high quality content. To get that high quality content we need more people, it might seem that I'm going in circles here but I think we just have to be patient.

It takes some time to really appreciate the advantages of the SE system, I don't really know how to change that. The ability to improve any question is very important to me, but new users most likely won't see the significance of that. The SE sites attract a certain kind of user, but they are also a bit elitist (in a good way), the whole concept discourages users that are not constructive and that don't put any effort into their contributions. I think that this is a good thing, but it also limits our potential user base. I see nothing wrong with just growing organically, without forcing the issue.

And in the end the low conversion rate can be compensated by a high volume of traffic, which is probably easier to achieve.

To get some quantitative data on our conversion rate I created a query for active users with >200 reputation that visited the site in the last 30 days before the data dump. This data is certainly not ideal, but is the only data available to me.

Site          active users         views
----------------------------------------
Gaming        348                  15k
AskUbuntu     373                  16k
English       198                  3.5k
Photography   183                  2.6k
Tex           189                  4.2k
WebApps       199                  3.3k

While our conversion rate is worse than that of other SE2.0 sites, in absolute numbers only AskUbuntu is better than us (out of the sites available in the data explorer). Therefore I don't think we really have a problem here, though it would certainly be nice to improve our conversion rate.

I still think that most users for other SE 2.0 sites arrive from the trilogy sites, and that those users are far, far more likely to become active users than people arriving via search engines. But I don't have access to any data that could confirm my hypothesis.

Answer 2

Part of it is because unlike places like AskUbuntu or Stack Overflow, it's not like our scope is often dealing with new problems. The vast majority of gaming problems are already solved - and importantly, not solved here. They've been solved for years. And also unlike those places, the solutions are relatively easier to find.

Old games account for the vast majority of possible questions to be asked. How to defeat Wrexsoul, how to access that Secret Area of Super Mario World, why I keep putting down the yellow orb when it's a red door, what is the Kraid glitch, what stats and skills affect Regal Radiance, where is the Copy Ability in Milky Way Dreams, where are the gold cards in Shiny Slippy Icy Floor, how can I get the KARASAWA rifle, how can I defeat the Pulverizer Archangel...

There are so many questions like these that we are intended to be able answer. We can cover things from as broad as "How many stars are in Super Mario Galaxy 2" to individual strategy questions for each individual star. It's not like people aren't having these questions... people all over the world continue to play all of these old games. But these questions are almost always already answered, or something the player is just willing to brute force to discover. The only motivation to get these on the site comes from people who are already here and want to improve our library.

This leaves primarily new releases like Fallout 3 and in-dev games like Minecraft. And at the rate we pump out questions for those, the combination of new and old users really doesn't make room for a large conversion rate. We cover most of the concerns people have before they might even know they have them. And so we just become a resource like any other gaming help site - people will stop by knowing we have answers but aren't really needing to ask on their own.

We have superb engine for finding information. The problem is our library. If you compare a site like GameFAQs, they may not have the necessary ease of finding information that we would present. But because of the sheer breadth of their coverage, you can be pretty certain that it's probably buried in there somewhere. We don't have such power - we're very wild and haphazard about our coverage. And that doesn't make a solid impression.

How to fix it? I don't know yet. But it's something I've been looking into.

Answer 3

I think a large part of this has to do with the nature of the audience and the return value of becoming a contributor.

Stack Overflow

• Audience - Contributors and visitors to SO are quite used to attempting to make a name for themselves in a larger community by helping others solve problems. The very nature of programming is such that you are solving problems other people have. They are used to the solutions to these problems being found over time, whether that be via experimentation or research. Furthermore, the audience tends to be a bit more mature and willing to help those that have helped them in the past.
• Return value - Contributing to SO can become a large positive factor in your career. By contributing to SO over the course of months/years, you establish yourself as a subject-matter expert and have a vanity page (your profile) that does an excellent job of summarizing where your skills lie.

Gaming @ Stack Exchange

• Audience - People looking for answers to game questions are looking for their answers now. Given the choice of searching for a few minutes more for the instant answer or taking the time to ask a question on a site, they'll keep searching. If they can't find the answer, they'll create a Gaming account, ask their question, impatiently wait for the answer, then continue with their game. They tend to be more on the lookout for the instant gratification of the answer and don't think past it to help out the community that solved their problem because they are used to just getting the answer via anonymous means, applying the answer, and advancing without any sign that they were even at a site.
• Return value - Except in some limited cases, your contributions to Gaming will not provide much for a professional career. When gamers compare themselves to one another, they are used to doing it with high scores and tournaments rather than how much they actually know about all of the inner workings of video games in general or even specific video games.