How Goodreads can become better? Product Improvement Series - Post#2

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Goodreads is the world’s largest site for readers and book recommendations. It allows users to search its database of books, catalog their reading lists and share them with their friends. Though it boasts of 45 million unique visitors a month, there is still a lot of room for improvement for Goodreads. The objective of this write-up is to identify those areas and suggest some approaches to address the same.

We will first try to learn,

1. What does Goodreads offer to its users?
2. How does Goodreads earn its revenues?
3. Key factors that influence Goodreads’s growth
4. Who Goodreads’ users are and what are their needs

Answering the above will help us build an understanding of Goodreads’ value proposition, and then we will proceed to attempt the following:

5. Analyzing and comparing Goodreads Web Traffic Data with other websites

6. Identification of Problem Areas

7. How to approach towards solving the problems

8. Summarizing the analysis

What does Goodreads offer to its users?

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Reproducing the following from Goodreads’s website,

A Few Things You Can Do On Goodreads

See what books your friends are reading.

Track the books you’re reading, have read, and want to read.

Check out your personalized book recommendations. Our recommendation engine analyzes 20 billion data points to give suggestions tailored to your literary tastes.

Find out if a book is a good fit for you from our community’s reviews.

In short, Goodreads core value offerings include:

1. Networking features
2. Book recommendations
3. Functionality of bookmarking, tracking and see others’ book reading lists
4. Information about any book, including rating, reviews, similar books, etc. along with Search facility
5. A platform for authors to promote their book and engaging with readers (through their Goodreads Author program).

How does Goodreads earn its revenues?

It earns from:

1. Advertising, and
2. Affiliates (commission from book sales from major book publishers)

Key factors that influence Goodreads’s growth

The following table examines the factors that influence Goodreads’ growth (without scaling up these factors Goodreads cannot provide any significant value to its users):

Read more about collaborative filtering and how it is used widely by Amazon.

Thus, the decisive factors that determine Goodreads’ growth are itemized as follows in condensed manner:

• No. of new users (User Acquisition)
• Engagement of users (User Engagement)
• Appropriate Book recommendations
• Relevant Information of books (Content)

Understanding user persona

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The target users are both regular and casual readers, who usually like to search for particulars about books online. They might also use a mechanism to track their reading list or would like to try one if not using any presently.

There could be many motives behind searching for books, for e.g., to make a purchase decision, look for details, or randomly browsing titles, genres, or upcoming releases.

The impulse to search for a particular book can spring from various reasons:

• it could be due to academic requirements,
• interest generated to explore a book after watching a movie,
• to delve into specific genres/ similar titles,
• experimenting with reading new kinds of books,
• deciding whether to buy an e-book or hard copy,
• wondering what others think about a certain book/author, exploring, etc

Web Traffic Analysis

We will analyze Goodreads’ website traffic performance based on the following available data from similarweb.com and compare it with that of other websites operating in different industries but offer similar functionalities for searching, getting recommendations, and networking. (The detailed table is added at the end of the article)

Comparison of bounce rate of Goodreads with other websites

Comparing how many visitors come directly and through search on Goodreads with that for other websites

Observations:

• Except for Goodreads, all the other search/recommendation/networking sites get the majority of their traffic (around 53%) directly and have to depend less on search engines (organic traffic is less than 40%).
• Goodreads has a bounce rate of 54% where others have a bounce rate of 34–40%. A bounce is a single-page session on the site. Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors that leave the website after viewing only one page. More than half of the visitors land on Goodreads through search results, and more than 50% of them leave after seeing the review (i.e., most likely the information they were looking for) or from the homepage.

Analysis:

1. If 54% of all visitors are losing interest in Goodreads’ first page itself, it indicates that Goodreads is not able to hold the attention of majority of the users for a long time (indicating low user engagement)
2. The average time spent by a user in Goodreads is 4 minutes compared to that of 8 minutes in Facebook. It can be inferred that the remaining 46% of the users who choose to continue after landing on the first page are not networking actively in Goodreads, because, being a specialized networking and search portal for book readers, Goodreads would naturally have a narrowed user base and the average time spent per user should be higher compared to Facebook which is a general networking site having a much wider user base.
3. It requires some amount of time to acclimatize with the reading lists of other users. Even if one stumbles across a single book that catches his interest, it would significantly increase the time he decides to spend on the site and eventually would like to browse through similar books or the same author. The above data implies that many serious readers are not spending a lot of time on the website.
4. Mental model of users: Majority of the visitors are first searching for information and then logging in (if they feel the need to do so) and not the other way round. Receiving half of the entire user base from search results indicates that, Goodreads is not the platform of the first choice for searching information about books. It should also be noted that searching and viewing a book are the only two activities that do not require login. Hence, if half of the users are leaving the site after looking at book details, it indicates the user conversion metrics of the site are getting impacted. The conversion metrics can be defined by percentage of users who sign-up on the Goodreads after landing on the site.

Identification of the problem areas

It can be,therefore, inferred from the preceding analysis that:

1. Goodreads is not a very engaging website for the users, thus affecting the user engagement metrics.
2. Users don’t prefer Goodreads as the first choice for searching books. They still prefer Google (or any other general search portal) and hence that can put an impact on the Goodreads’ user acquisition metrics.

How to approach towards solving the problems?

User Journey in abstract form

The user journey comprises of two parts as shown in the preceding flow diagram:

• The loop labeled “1” depicts that the majority of Goodreads’ visitors is coming through search. If the visitor is not getting a satisfying user experience after seeing the landing page (most likely a book page), he will exit the site and come back only if he needs to search for information about some book at later time. An unsatisfactory user experience will lead to a low user conversion rate.
• The loop labeled “2” focuses on those processes improving which would lead to more user acquisition, engagement, and retention, as explained in the diagram.

Let us now identify the specific areas improving which would lead to better results for Goodreads:

1. User-friendliness of the website: Goodreads can be a more user-friendly website by addressing some of the following user pain-points:

• Providing a smoother sign-up process which is inconsistent right now. Currently, a user can sign in with its Google account but cannot sign-up for a new account with it. The visibility of “Sign- in with Google” is also not very obvious, compared to other signing-in options.

Not a smooth and consistent login experience for Google account holders.

• Using typography that is easy to read
• Displaying compelling calls-to-action, especially on homepage and book information pages
• Currently, every single webpage is filled with too many links which looks overwhelming.

Searching the search bar!

• Providing a search bar that:

~catches user’s attention quickly (currently a user has to scroll to get to the search bar)

~ is functional and shows relevant results

~has auto-complete functionality, a ubiquitous feature available across platforms and devices except for GoodReads.

2. By enlarging its range of books by adding titles from non-English languages like Indian languages (Sanskrit, Hindi,Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Odia, Assamese,Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and many others), German, Spanish, Japanese, etc. At present majorly English titles are available that can drive away many visitors who are interested to search for books in regional languages as well.

3. By establishing Goodreads profile sharing a mainstream phenomenon by making its design look so cool and chic that users would feel some pride to show it to the world, just the way they share their Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Medium profiles. Currently, the entire website, especially the Profile page, looks very Orkut-ish and outdated compared to the user interface standards of 2021.

Summarizing the analysis

• Goodreads serves as a networking, book recommendation, and book tracking site for its users, and facilitates author-reader engagement on its platform.
• To increase its user base and user engagement, Goodreads can provide its visitors a better user experience so that they can easily sign up, search and browse for titles, track their reading lists and share these with their friends.
• It can be accomplished by upgrading the Goodreads website and bring it at par (but not necessarily identical) with other social networking/recommendation/search sites. Currently, the user interface resembles that of websites used in the 90s or early 2000s. With the development of new technologies and the evolution of user preferences, it is important to innovate to keep up with the changing needs of the world.
• More than 50% of the visitors are coming from the organic (search results). It indicates, that an average person feels that Google/Bing is more useful for finding out information about books, despite Goodreads being a specialized portal to cater to this exact need. Therefore, creating a better positioning strategy for being the no.1 search portal for books will help it gain more credibility and users.

P.S. The detailed table is as follows for reference from similarweb.com

Source: Collated from similarweb.com