Halloween Month of October Report

Now that the Halloween spook and the month of October are officially over, it’s time to recap that month. The wonderful news is that TutorZ has achieved an all time record of 777 processed tutoring jobs. This tops our previous record which was exactly one year ago, October 2012 when we had 769 tutoring jobs.

Counter intuitively, with the highest job count in TutorZ’s history, secondary stats fell behind the ones in the month of September.  The unique visitor count dropped again below the 10,000 mark, 9,860 to be precise.  The visits count also dropped slightly from 12,880 to 12,300, and so did the average time spent on site: 5:38 minutes to 5:18 minutes.

Continuing on the secondary stats we see a slight downward trend in the bounce rate which increased from 42% to 43%,  and the Alexa worldwide rank fell again in the beyond 1,000,000 territory.  Furthermore, new tutor sign ups have also dropped slightly from 65 to 51.

How does the increased lead count be explained when having lower visitor stats? The likely answer is that Google’s Hummingbird algorithm is doing a better job in sending relevant traffic to TutorZ.

While the back-to-school season started late and slow, the month of September 2013 ended strong. In fact, with an number of 746 tutoring jobs this September became almost as successful as the all-time record of October 2012 when we referred 769 students to tutors. Moreover, the unique visitor count crossed the 10,000 mark for the first time; 10,248 to be precise.

How can the increased job count be explained when having (slightly) lower visitor stats? Google is the culprit. Google’s Hummingbird algorithm – about which we talked about in last month’s report – is doing a better job in sending relevant traffic to Tutorz.com. Improved traffic through a semantically analysis of the search query is Hummingbird’s hallmark.

Another way to explain this discrepancy in the stats is that in October were no major marketing events. Columbus Day and Halloween did not compare to the significance to TutorZ as did the  California Company of Excellence and Homeschooling Curriculum awards in September.

Beginning in mid-October our customer service department sends an extra email to students in response to each tutoring requests. This results in a higher job referral rate to our partner company WyzAnt and better matched tutees.  Featurewise we rolled out the first phase of editorial reviews. Next we know have 5 automated tutor engagement emails. Today, we roll out the tutor account hold feature.  This feature removes inactive tutors from our search while keeping the tutor’s accounts intact.  Finally, we converted our mysql database from MyISAM to InnoDB in order to accommodate our problem with page view counters in tutor profiles.

In November we look forward to the full release of editorial reviews and automated tutor-student match emails.