I thought it might be interesting to put up some stats and reflect on how the behaviour trends may influence how the book is distributed.
The current site provides three links, one to each medium I intended to distribute the book. A click of one of these links provides some indication that a reader would like to look at the content of the book or find out more about the book.
The results of unique clicks were:
- Clicked Link: 66%
- Didn't Click: 34%
These results don't really show anything other than more people want to find out more than want to immediately bounce from the site.
Of those unique visitors who clicked a link, it is useful to know which link was clicked in order to provide an indication of how users may want to consume the books contents via different mediums. The results of page links clicked were as follows:
- Read free on the web: 75%
- Buy the eBook PDF: 19%
- Buy the paperback: 6%
It's quite expected that reading the book for free on the web would be the majority preference. What is interesting here is that a good size of the population were interested in buying the PDF version. I was thinking of providing the PDF version for free as well, but these results are making me think hard about selling the PDF instead, if only for a few dollars.
Finally, after clicking one of the three links, the user is presented with a message indicating that the book is not completed yet and can provide an email address to be contacted when it is completed. The results for link clicks that resulted in a collected email address were:
- Provided Email: 30%
- No Email: 70%
People don't like leaving email addresses I guess. Although, it is interesting to note that the vast majority (>90%) of email addresses that were collected were by those who clicked the 'read it free on the web' link. This perhaps suggests a greater desire to participate in the project (even if it is only to be notified when it is completed) when it is considered free.
After providing an email address, the user was then presented with a link to the Clever Algorithms github project where I'm developing the content for the book in the form of technical reports. The link isn't really secure other than via obscurity, although I provided as a type of teaser. It is hard to know how many who left an email address clicked the link, but the traffic graphs and follow counts for the project on github remain very low. I was hoping the perspective readers of the finished book might be interested in reviewing and helping to refine content for the book before it is finished. A little ambitious perhaps.
The site has had limited to no marketing (other than this blog really) so the total population size of unique visits was relatively low for the month and a half, and as such any analysis of the collected statistics could only be used as high-level heuristics.
I am very close to halfway through the algorithms for the book and I expect to release all content created to-date on the website within weeks. I've also got a talented young designer on the case helping me with all the art related stuff like the cover design, web site design, and general look and feel. Early iterations of the cover have me very excited!
Finally, I've been pushing all prepared material to my scribd account in the form of technical reports. Interestingly, some of the reports are getting far more reads than the others, such as the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm, Evolution Strategies, Tabu Search, Stochastic Hill Climbing, and Scatter Search. Although the reads statistics are relatively good they are not converting to visits to the book project website (linked at the top of each report). It will be good to release this content on the book website soon and see what keywords and sources are driving interest in this content.
Finally, I've been pushing all prepared material to my scribd account in the form of technical reports. Interestingly, some of the reports are getting far more reads than the others, such as the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm, Evolution Strategies, Tabu Search, Stochastic Hill Climbing, and Scatter Search. Although the reads statistics are relatively good they are not converting to visits to the book project website (linked at the top of each report). It will be good to release this content on the book website soon and see what keywords and sources are driving interest in this content.
