Days/Visits to purchase statistics

7 11 2007

Have you ever wondered how much time average customer needs to buy your game since downloading it? I wonder all the time, but now I have some statistics to show.

Days to purchase statistic:
Days to purchase

Visits to purchase statistic:
Visits to purchase

As you can see most of purchases occur on day 0 (same day visitor entered my website) and within one visit on my website. It’s reasonable that people buy on day 0. They download, play, trial ends and if they like it they make impulse buy.

The problem is that they should need mostly 2 visits, not 1. First visit to download the game, second visit to purchase it. So what happend? There are 5 possible explanations:

  • people downloaded your game elsewhere and visited your site only to purchase the game (game downloaded from portal, download sites, etc.)
  • people downloaded the game from your site using different browser than the one they used to purchase the game (buy now button opens default browser, which may be different than the one your customer uses mostly)
  • Google Analytics counts it as one visit because it happend within short time frame – by default GA is sets sessions to 30 minutes, if your trial is short or player buys before trial expires, then it might be true. Some of my games (Maggie, Path of Magic) have trials shorter than 30 minutes.
  • your sales copy (game description) is so great, that people buy your game without downloading it :)
  • cookies are off or deleted regularly

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading ... Loading ...






Setting up goals in Google Analytics

6 11 2007

If you want to get more complete image about your website you need to know how well your site is converting. It was designed with a specific goal in mind, be it game download, game purchase or filling up newsletter form. Google Analytics can help you track goal conversion rate.

For a website dedicated to games I advise to setup two goals: game download and game purchase. Those two are the most important goals your site should be aimed for. You need to maximize number of downloads per visitor and your games should maximize number of purchases.

If your Google Analytics account is set up and working you can proceed to setup goals. Click Edit link in Settings column. In the second table you will be able to setup up to 4 goals. Click edit on G1.

You will need to enter goal information: Goal URL and Goal Name. URL is important. Google uses it to determine whether the goal was achieved or not. If you enter wrong URL, your goal will not be tracked. Goal name is not that important, but keep it meaningful.

If you want G1 to track downloads you can skip funnel section completely. If you track purchases you can enter URL of all steps that are necessairy to complete order, like enter billing informations, credit card data, etc. You will be able to check where people abondon purchase process.

In additional settings you can set 3 important parameters:
– case sensitive – check it if your URL is case sensitive
– match type – there are 3 options: exact match, head match and regular expression match
– goal value – if you know average CR for games on your site you can enter ie. $0.2 (1% CR and $20 games). You can set it to 0 if you plan to track orders in G2

Match type is the trickiest one. First of all, to make it work, you need a page your game is downloading that will redirect to a certain binary file. On this page you need to put Google Analytics code. And last but not least, if you want to track all downloads, you better put that page in subfolder download and choose regular expression match. Enter /download/ as Goal URL. Otherwise if you enter URL without or with www. one of this URL’s will not be tracked.

As I mentioned in one of my previous articles, tracking orders is not so easy. First of all, you need to put Google Analytics code on your invoice page. If you are using eSellerate, you are lucky. eSellerate is kind enough to setup this on request. I don’t know if other e-commerce providers can assist you with it, but their help would let you not only track number of transactions, but also order value and quantity of purchased products (and even more, like average order value, site conversion rate, revenue per medium, etc.).

If you want to track revenue per medium (referrals), then you need to do one more thing. You need to pass Google Analytics cookies to third-party domain, which is your e-commerce providers domain. Due to security restrictions, you cannot do it from your own domain. I use set of php scripts that redirect visitors to eSellerate shopping cart. If you don’t use such scripts, you better start using them. I modified those scripts to fetch Google Analytics cookies and save them into database along with visitor IP. Then, when shopping cart loads into browser, it calls another php script on my page that writes JavaScript code to setup cookies on eSellerate domain. It sound complicated, but it’s not that hard. In next article I’ll post PHP code that does it all.

Once you get some orders you’ll be able to see a lot of great informations about your website. But having information is just the beggining, what you do with it is the key to your success.

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading ... Loading ...






Build your beta testers list

4 11 2007

One of the biggest advantages of working with a publisher or a big portal is the ability to use their beta test groups. They usually have a lot of people interested to play games and send feedback. What’s more important, those are not random people, but casual players.

email listYou need your own army of beta testers ready to play your games. You need to hear honest answers from people that are not your friends and never played your game. This will let you catch a lot of stuff that is so obvious that you would never think of it ;-)

Start building your list today. It’s easy and once you set up this there’s little for you to do. By the time your game is ready you will have a lot of people ready to test your game.

It doesn’t matter if you use your own custom forms to collect emails or newsletter service provider. You need to make it automatic and collect: first name, email address and operating system (Windows, OSX or Linux). I use ymlp.com and it works great for me.

Setup a page “Become a BETA tester”, put a link to it on your website, give people some incentive (like a free game for valuable feedback or big discount). That’s it. But don’t forget, once your game reaches beta stage mail those people and listen carefully. If you mail them once your game goes gold then it’s too late.

I wish I started building my bete testers list when I started developing games. By now I would have 300 or more emails instead of 42.

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading ... Loading ...






Test, test and once again test!

2 11 2007

Marketers say that your headline and first paragraph of your offer are the most important elements of it. That means that any change in one of them may have a huge impact on your conversion.

I started an experiment last week to improve Path of Magic page. Because this site doesn’t have much traffic I decided to play only with headline (one with a headline Help Evelyne Save Avalon and one without it). Here are the two versions I’ve created:

Path without Headline  Path with Headline

Can you guess which one is better? My educated guess goes to the one with headline – it has some kind of call to action. But boy, how wrong was I. The one without a headline is over 84% better.

Path Headline Test Results

Imagine my disappointent after investing $1000 in advertising without checking the impact of change in headline? 4 words can drop return on investment by 84%.

I don’t want to say that no headline is always better. I want to say: TEST, TEST and once again TEST!

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading ... Loading ...