Contributed by: Editor on Tuesday, June 10 2008 @ 11:29 am
Last modified on
The unofficial eHarmony Blog got the scoop on eHarmony's traffic statistics being accessible to the public at Quantcast[*1] . eHarmony has been a Quantified Publisher since February 2008. This means the traffic information is very accurate because a script or tracking image is inserted into every page at eHarmony which allows detailed tracking of all visitors.
The first thing to realize is (if you don't know too much about this type of thing), don't worry about being tracked. It happens on most web sites. Online businesses(and blog owners) want to know about their traffic, since obviously visitors are the bread and butter. If you do worry about it, visit the sites Privacy Policy where they should tell you what is done with this information. The main things most companies want to know about visitors are:
Depending on the industry, the company may want to know other information as well. Online Dating Services are in the unique position of knowing a lot more about their visitors (at least the ones who have created a profile and logged in). They can gather accurate statistics on the gender, age, ethnicity and many other traits that are recorded in the members profile. This helps the dating service tremendously in figuring out how to maximize profits. They can see what type of advertising is working and what part of the site is not visited and needs to be improved. The surprise here is that eHarmony has allowed this information to go public. For competitive reasons most dating services and other online businesses tend to keep this information private.
Now, let's look at some interesting facts we gathered from Quantcast.
When you look at visitors by country from last month:
At number 1 was the United States with 4.1 million unique visitors. Number 2 was Canada at 237,000 unique visitors. For some reason Ghana was number 3 at just over 34,000 unique visitors. United Kingdom came in at fourth with 19,743 visitors and Australia was 5th with 16,032 unique visitors. Having the United States, Canada and Australia in the top 5 makes sense since these are all countries with a tailored design eHarmony dating site. I can understand the UK being there as well since our culture is very similar and the service would be a good match for a lot of singles over there. Plus, eHarmony has announced a UK site to launch this month (see story). The only real reason I see for a country from Africa (Ghana) being in the top 5 is this is a country maybe where a lot of scammers may be from.
The top 5 states from which visitors at eHarmony are from is California, Texas, New York, Florida and then Illinois. The state of California leads by a large margin at over 13% of the uniques at 539,941 for the month of May. Texas is in second but at almost half the numbers of California, with 270,131 unique visitors.
In terms of the number of repeat visitors at eHarmony in May, 44% of the 4.3 million unique visitors, visited the dating site just once. 49% of the visitors visited eHarmony more than once but not as much as 8% of the visitors who went to eHarmony at least 30 separate times in May. In terms of total visits in May this means those 8% of people made up 65% of the total visits to eHarmony, while the one time visitors was at 4% and the regular visitors was at 31% of the total visitors. This means in May, 2008, eHarmony had a total number of visitors of (including repeats):
4,353,425 UV * 44% = 1,915,507 single visitors in the month of May.
(1,915,507 / 4%) = 47,887,675 Total Visitors (including repeats) for the month of May.
One other general fact I noted was, since the beginning of April 2008, eHarmony has lost almost 1 million unique visitors (see included chart image). There are probably several factors at work here. Some of them may include the down turn in the US economy, less advertising spending and the spring season where people tend to want to be outside more and not stuck in front of a computer.
The interesting thing with the US demographics listed at Quantcast is they are based on the "audience composition relative to the U.S. internet average" and does not tie in with the information eHarmony has gathered in the profiles. So, this information may not be as accurate as the rest included in this article. Visit Quantcast explanation of the US internet average for more details.
For more information about this dating service, read out eHarmony Review.