I run two different types of sites: one runs largely on autopilot while gaining a steady amount of traction each month while the other one’s traffic grows (or shrinks), depending on the amount of effort I put into it. It’s fun to watch both data sets and see how vastly different they are, and I’ve come to learn that each one has a slightly different growth metrics. They are users and supporters.
While there are some similarities between the two, the latter is more of an unofficial one. It’s the one that I list out on a spreadsheet, manually updating each time I can define someone as a supporter. Supporters are people who I have actively engaged with and had a conversation with, so it’s not your typical daily active user metric you can just whip up through Google Analytics. It’s a way more fun metric to see grow, or decline … which really means it’s a daily measurement of my own personal efforts or lack thereof. And it made me question of whether something like that could be measured at scale — is there some analytical tool out there that would sift through my messages, maybe calculate the interest level based on the type of count of emojis used during a conversation? I have no idea, but it’s just one of those epiphanies that came out busting through my head on a late Friday afternoon that I wish could be visualized somehow.