There’s a thread on this forum ‘Mojeek needs more marketing’, I saw a post on mastodon about a tilvids video ‘Why should you care about tracking’ and on the Mojeek blog I don’t see any audience measurement.
I’m curious. I do agree that privacy is very important, so I do agree with the points from the video linked above and the Mojeek values. But reeding the post linked above, users seem to find that Mojeek could still grow in visibility.
My employer tries to follow all GDPR rules and uses a selfhosted Matomo to measure the result of their marketing campaigns and general efforts. When someone visits the website, they need to agree with audience measurement cookies in order for Matomo to start measuring (there are 3 types of cookies: the always enables technical ones, the optional audience measurement and the optional advertising and third party ones).
Now I’m wondering: How do you know for instance that the content on your blog is interesting for people? How do you know if you reach new people (at the end of the day, I think you do want to grow your user base). Do you have any vague idea of who your users at the moment are, have you an idea of the users you would like to have, and do you have a plan on how to reach those users? In short: how does Mojeek know what the return is for its marketing efforts?
Would you mind giving some insight in how Mojeek tackles its marketing?
Asking out of curiosity and to learn from your workflow.
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We don’t use third party analytics, and do our utmost to avoid any 3rd party stuff as it is a dependency and will create another thing that you are reliant upon. As per the Mojeek Privacy Policy we have aggregated statistics on pageviews etc. but kept in a way that avoids the ability to identify any individual user.
My experience from coming on to 10 years of doing this kind of work in various different industries is that primary data, collecting answers to questions actively, is more useful to a marketing department than that which you collect passively. This is not just because the data itself is normally more rich, but also because of the culture that actually speaking to people instills within an organisation - which is why we’ve maintained spaces like this, a very open support inbox, and have undertaken direct user interviews.
This being said, these aggregate metrics are used in order to determine success, with the number of searches being the main thing that we keep an eye on. Slimming down your success to one single number, or rather prioritising one number above others, can help cut out a lot of noise; it could be useful for this to read Alistair Croll’s Lean Analytics (2013) - the “One Metric That Matters” - I am not a giant fan of these kinds of books, which tend to just be an elongated blog post, but this one was a decent read.
We build tools and improve off the back of user feedback, pushing these out through our own channels, as well as contacting those in the press and those writing blogs to get further eyeballs on things. On top of this we keep a constant watch on things being said in the wider web, as well as doing our utmost to equip people with the tools and knowledge they need to recommend Mojeek to people if they so desire; the best promotion of your service always comes from someone who isn’t you 
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Thanks for the interesting and inspiring read.
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