Simple trick that can increase your site CR by 63%
30 10 2007Few weeks ago, Nedzad Orman complained about his site CRd2p (www.yupgames.com). It was at a very low level of 0.19%. He wasn’t happy with it, especially considering the amount of time & work he put into the site. Today he reported that his site CR is up by 63%.
Yupgames.com has a very high ranking in Google. If you type download games it shows on the first page of results. Considering competition that exists in this market this is very good result. Most visitors come to yupgames from search engines (majority from Google), searching to download games. Number of completed (not requested) downloads is close to 2000 daily. Before he changed his website he had 3-4 sales daily. After the change he gets 5-7 sales daily and his site CR jumped up to 0.31%.
What I did: I set up my own tracking system, I do not use Reflexive ‘Game rank’ anymore, instead I have a script which counts downloads, other script which import sales from Reflexive Order xml feed and I count conversion. If a game doesn’t perform well or doesn’t sell at all, script flag it as ‘disabled’ and the game isn’t available at site anymore. A day after, conversion and sales jumped, and it’s 0.31% (still not much, but way better). Also, I force better conversion games to front page etc…
I don’t think anything is wrong with Reflexive Gamerank. I think some other reasons apply: every site has it’s own visitors demographic, based on traffic sources etc.
Anyway, together with even better Google positions of my site than few weeks back this is gona be my first month with more than 100 sales Not much for many of you, but I believe I’m on the right path.
It’s important to know your visitors. Even if game A sells great on portal X it doesn’t automaticaly mean it will sell great on your website. Once again, know your visitors, serve them what they want, serve them what they like.
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One sneaky trick that I’ve heard some developers use is targeting specific keywords that will relate your particular game(s) to other major popular video games. For example, games like halo 3 and metroid prime 3 are big now, but if you can somehow relate those keywords into your game description, surfers can often stumble upon your site.
Never tried it myself since I don’t have any products to sell :p…
Neuro, what you describe is a good trick to get visitors, not necessarily buyers, but if you do it well, you can get both.
Yeah thats what I meant though. At the end of it all, marketing and sales is all a numbers game (not that I’m any marketing expert or anything) and the higher amount of visitors you can get to your site, the potentially higher chance of getting a sale. Of course you can do a bit of everything and disable all low performing games, and displaying all the high selling games, which all helps out at the very end.
Good trick about boosting the best converting games and dropping the crap ones.
Wait … what?
The article says that by dropping the below-average converting games, the average conversion rate subsequently rises.
That’s not a surprise — that is the definition of the average. The fact that this was even mentioned, leads me to think that maybe things haven’t been thought through very well.
The only metric that makes sense is total number of sales per day.
I would go to the site to see if he quantifies this, but I can’t find a link to the original posting.
The link is in the first sentence (in brackets).
If your site has ability to generate only certain amout of downloads and you don’t care what they download as long as they buy, then forcing people to download games with better conversion is smart.
Nice and good idea, but if you use some type of aff and cant get sales data?
And another one point – “Most visitors come to yupgames from search engines” – and they come to exact searched game page – if you removed this game some minutres ago – what user will see and what user will do after it?
@Denis:
If you can’t do it automatically, you can do it manually.
You don’t have to delete the game from your catalogue, just remove it from the front page.
Hi Roman:
2 – yes, as I think. but in this case the most traffic need to come to front page – how to manage this?
1 – I say about bfg affiliate system – right now I can’t get sales data by games.. :(
I don’t have experience with BFG system. BFG stystem in more of referral than affiliate. The only thing that comes to my mind that can help you improve your site in this case is smart use of google website optimizer and split testing. You can check which combination of games on the front page generates most downloads and use that one.