I’ve finally finished tabulating the results of the 2012 TTAG readers’ survey. Thank you for playing. I was hoping for about 400 responses to get the 95 percent error down to a reasonable five percent stat. Thanks to 1,699 responses we’re down to a three percent sampling error with 99 percent confidence. For you non-math nerds out there that might not mean much. For me the ability to use a 99 percent confidence interval instead of the 95 percent means a lot. As in this is the straight dope. On to the results…
First things first, the NPS score.
Customer service oriented companies use NPS or “Net Promoter Score” to determine how well they’re doing. They ask the question “How likely are you to recommend X to a friend or coworker” (which incorporates a lot of personal judgements about the product and distills them into a single question quite nicely). Respondents answer the query on a 1 to 10 scale.
From there it’s the percentage of people who answered with a 9 or 10 minus the percentage of people who answered one through six. The people who answer with a nine or 10 are considered “promoters.” They’ll tell people about your service or product. The one through six are more likely to say negative things about your service to others. Seven and eight don’t really go one way or the other, so they get dropped from the calculations.
The NPS range goes from -100 to 100. Anything above 50 is considered a “world class” operation. So how did we do?
NPS: 60
Awww yeah. Pretty good, but we can do better. And thanks to the NPS score being tagged to the rest of the questions, we can tease out what the people who don’t like us don’t like about us!
But first, the demographics. These are pretty much what we expected, so I’m just going to dump them all at once.
We have a pretty good mix of old and young guys reading the site. As expected, most of the 17 or younger crowd seems to be too distracted by internet [non gun] porn to read anything else on the internet. Moving on . . .
Raise your hand if you didn’t see that one coming. Most of the readers are guys, something I really want to change. Hopefully we can get Destinee to do some more of her great reviews. I know there are a couple women waiting in the wings for some high powered weaponry to review, so we’ll get on that. And I’ll tell RF to tone it down with the supermodels.
This one seems to be perfectly in line with what we’re seeing from the NSSF. It also matches up nicely with the proportions of the guns we’ve reviewed. Handguns are the most popular firearm, with rifles a close second and shotguns a distant third. This graph includes people who own all three, so this gives us an idea of what kind of firearm you guys are looking to purchase. We’ll continue to tailor our review mix to that.
I was shocked by the population of readers who concealed carry. I was expecting the percentage to fall closer to the national population (something like 10 percent of gun owners). Most of you guys carry. Good stuff . We’ll get some more CCW experts to write articles.
Now we get to the most important part of the analysis, and specifically the question I asked about which features you guys like most on the site. It gives us an idea about what kind of mix of articles we need; where we should invest our time and money.
Gun reviews are by far and away the #1 thing you guys like. Reviews are labor and time intensive; we’re working hard to keep ’em coming. With standardization of the format we’re determined to maintain the standards you expect. To that end, I was surprised and delighted at the results to the question about trusting our reviews.
I promise to do everything in my power to keep our reviews fair, honest and unbiased. Or, if they are biased, to let you guys know in advance. We will never bash something without good reason.
So, we know what you guys like. What’s driving readers away? I took the “least favorite feature” question and pruned it so that only responses from people who rated TTAG a 1-6 on the NPS question would be shown. Here’s what I came up with.
Looks like political stuff is what’s making people pull their hair out. Strangely enough, when I add everyone else’s responses into the graph it looks almost exactly the same.
The people who don’t like the Ask Foghorn segments, by the way, don’t like it when I try to talk tactics. Like using a handgun for home defense. Hey, you asked. On the other hand, when its something technical, people seem to really like them. So, message received, sticking to the technical nuts and bolts.
As for the political stuff, the feeling I’m getting is that you guys don’t really like it so much when TTAG authors get up on their soapbox and start pontificating. At least, that’s what I’m getting from the comments. For example:
Be careful about straying too far into the politics. TTAG is largely libertarian but it risks becoming another Prison Planet site that isn’t taken seriously.
And then again…
[Get rid of t]he political BS that you guys sometimes fall into. Sometimes it is a bit too much, but I do understand the viewpoints expressed, but it can be tiresome. We all know that the gun grabbers exist, and they suck . . . In other words just a little less political and more about guns and training ideas which I find educational.
In general, the vast majority of the feedback we got was not only positive but helpful in figuring out where we need to focus our attention. You guys seem to like what we’re doing, and we intend to focus on the things that we do best. And with a little luck, next year we’ll be up to 70 for the NPS score.
Oh, one last thing though:
Hey Boss? About that raise…