Sell More Games

Last week I featured Tom’s Hen House and Maggie the Gardener 2 on MacZOT (Nov 3rd). I made it a bundle with retail price at $22.94 and the discounted price at $13.65. My bundle was featured for 24 hours and it managed to get 12 orders. Not much, but that 12 orders I didn’t have to pay to get them.

Besides 12 orderers I received 89 visitors from MacZOT (yes, you can link to your website) with 27% convertion to download ratio (though most of people downloaded the game directly via MacZOT download links).

MacZOT is a website that offers great Mac apps at great prices. We work with independent Mac developers to bring you special ZOT discounts on some of the best Mac applications available today. We have a new offer just about every day. The offer period is for 24 hours only (or as indicated on the time clock on the main page), during which time you can download and demo the featured product by clicking on the TRY button. If you decide to go for it, you simply return to the main page and click the BUY button. We use PayPal to process our payments, and it is very simple and quick. You do not need a PayPal account to purchase using PayPal.

MacZOT takes a fair share of the price (40-60%), but you can get all custumer emails if you need/want to (you need to send them serials or links to full version somehow). On most portals you earn much less than that.

I’ve spoken with Lisa Biskup from MacZOT to find out more about their service:

Probably only sold that many because the games are not well known already and because of that, not that many people downloaded them to try. Also, game bundles are good, if the games are well known, but maybe not so much if not.

The games that do the best are like Monopoly, Scrabble, Bejeweled 2, etc. when they are discounted down to about $10.95 or $11.95.

Anything that is $9.95 sells way more than $13.95. Our customers are definitely looking for a great deal. And they will buy it even if they don’t have a chance to try it because what’s $10.

Also, our audience likes games but we sell a lot more of productivity type apps, so apps that help people make more money or make their job easier. We only do games on the weekends for that reason.

I’d love it if you’d share your experience with macZOT. For some developers 12 in one day is a lot and for others it is nothing. We have had several 1000s sell in one day of bundles and of single apps over 1000 as well. It just really depends on how great the deal is and what the app is.

It is a good way to promote your app and we obviously like to make some too in order to keep our business alive. We can’t just run apps that will make us $50 per day.

Do you have a great Mac game? If so, contact me and contact MacZOT :)

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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:

Visits to purchase statistic:

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

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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:

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.

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!

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Few 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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