Cambridge Bumps Launch Post Mortem

I launched cambridgebumps.com this week during the annual Cambridge Town Bumps event (see the Cambridgeshire Rowing Association for details). However this post is about the website and not the rowing.

With 110 crews taking part we know that there are at worst around 1000 people interested in looking at results. I'll take 800 users and 1,500 sessions and deem the launch successful.

Average session duration appears good at over five minutes and the bounce rate is satisfactory.

Who makes up the audience?

A good spread of ages here. Only 41% of sessions were from women but I can't draw any firm conclusions because I don't know the underlying split of women/men in the population who care about bumps results.

This is the first website I've developed with mobile as the primary target platform.

Pretty much as expected. The majority of visits come from mobile devices. Despite targeting mobile I must say the experience is still superior on desktop; with several features only available there.

My hunch is that mobile suits looking up live/recent results. Whereas desktop suits looking back at past results and a more exploratory usage pattern. It would be good to test this hypothesis.

This is the first time I've set up Google Adwords for a personal project. Making up almost a fifth of traffic this was an attempt to reach people outside my immediate social media reach. It is clearly not cost effective (as I have no intention to monetise this website).

Organic search was poor but expected. There was no time to develop a good search ranking. Next year will be a better test once the website has had time to find its way into organic search results.

What one area would I look to improve?

Definitely live results. There is a demand for it. My workaround was to wait for the official results to be put online and then update my website. This already means there is a delay of several hours.

The process of actually updating my website was also difficult. It is easy on a laptop where I can put up the results and my website side-by-side. On my phone I have to switch between screens and it is very error prone.

All in all a satisfying project to work on. Bring on the new rowing season!