You made almost $200k in 2008. That’s pretty impressive for indie developer. My sales are 10 times worse. What have you done to achieve such great sales?

Ahahaha. I didn’t make $200k in 2008. That’s the revenue from direct sales through my main payment provider. I earn other amounts from other deals. And then to find out how much I actually *make* you’d have to subtract all the expenses, and they can be surprisingly high when you actually pay for advertising, and a dedicated server. I guess the way I achieve it is to make games that are not easily copied and cloned, and I put quite a lot of work into promoting them. I also get very into the business side of selling games. if you sell games, and you don’t know which pages on your website have the lowest bounce rates, if you don’t know what the average CPC is for your ads and do A/B testing to increase the CTR…. and much more importantly, if you have no idea WTF I’m talking about, then you are quite simply losing sales to people like me, who study this stuff :D.

Imagine that I know what CTR, A/B testing and all that stuff is… but still my ads are not efficient. Maybe I am just not patient enough? How long do you test them before you pick a winner ad?

It’s a matter of impressions and clicks. not time. If I have 2 ads and one has got 100 clicks and the other got 60 clicks, with the same impressions, I’ll ditch the 60 click ad. That might be a day, or 6 hours, or two weeks.

You are probably one of the very few indie devs that constantly invest in marketing. What is your marketing budget and where do you advertise?

My marketing budget varies, but its basically about 90% of my day to day costs excluding paying contract artists. I probably get through about £450 a month on Google Adwords, and I advertise a fair few other places too. That really adds up. Over the year, you are talking maybe $10,000 on advertising, maybe more. I advertise in absolutely tons of places, but Google gets the lions share.

Does it pay back? A lot of indies complain that advertising is a waste of money?

A lot of indies don’t take the time to really study advertising. My favorite book right now is ‘the advertised mind’ which is like neuroscience for advertisers. You really need to know your stuff. You can’t just throw $100 at the wall and hope it sticks. Also, sometimes ads don’t sell any games, but they give you information. If your ads get 1000 visitors to your site and nobody clicks the demo link, maybe your site design needs work, or you are advertising to the wrong people. It takes literally years of fiddling and tweaking and learning to develop the ad campaign that works for you. I price different keywords for different countries for different days of the week for different ad placements all differently. If you just slap down $100 and say “I’ll pay 12 cents a click for this keyword”, then you are laughably un-optimised.

My biggest problem with Adwords is that even if I get hight CTR (around 3%) people just don’t download – only 1 of 10 or 1 of 5 at best downloads advertised game. If you get better results did you do anything to get them? Did you optimize your download page?

Yes. I use Googles Website Optimiser to do A/B testing. The results are eye opening. In some cases, pages are too simple and people bounce away from it quickly. In other cases, the amount of clutter gives people something to do rather than click download. I found a page where adding a youtube video decreased demo downloads. I had another where listing the awards the game won actually reduced downloads. It’s very game specific. You HAVE to test. Companies test varieties of chocolate bar on customers. Your download button is your chocolate bar.

Do you track your ads? What tools do you use?

Oh yes :D. I track everything with google analytics, and sometimes compare it against awstats data too. Analytics is the best free tool that I know about. Most people use maybe 1% of the features in that software, it can do amazing stuff.

What is the most important feature of Google Analytics then?

The bounce rate is the thing I check most often. After that, I check time spent on site, but I do this per-ad campaign, and per-referrer. A visit from gametunnel is valuable to me. A visit from stumbleupon is nearly worthless. I also do the two metrics stuff a lot, where I can compare the behavior of visitors who actually convert to downloads, versus those who do not.

Do you create your banners on your own? Who gives ideas for them?

I used to use a flash banner artist who did some great ads, a guy I used to work with, but generally I do my own ads. I find that changing the ads often gives a good response, and it’s suprising what works best. I always do LOTS of variants I can tell you, for example, that people are more likely to click on a democracy 2 ad themed around socialists or patriots, than they are around commuters, capitalists or the defence budget.

What are the other places besides Google Adwords that you advertise on?

Ah that would be telling :D

What is your typical day? How many hours do you put into marketing, development, and support?

I am always working, mainly because I love it. Maybe once I move house and get a safer garden I’ll take up more time with archery, but to be honest, my main hobby is writing games, which is also my job.  I start work around 8.30 AM, and will work through to around 7PM, but from then till midnight I’ll occasionally be checking emails and handling support if there isn’t much on TV. I spend a lot more time on business and marketing than most indies. When I *do* code, I can zone out and get lots done very quickly.

You are famous for making a lot of guerrilla marketing, like the one with talking to pirates. What is your favorite trick? Beside getting more eyeballs did you get any sales?

yes it did boost sales, but although nobody ever believes me, it was a genuine question and not a PR stunt. PR stunts can work, but they have to be tied in to your games. A discount on inauguration day works for me, because it makes sense in the context of the game. I’ve made games that have some kind of ‘story’ and ‘angle’ to them in PR terms. If you make a match3 game, you really don’t have any way to leverage it as PR.

You sell Democracy 2 for $24.95, but Kudos 2 for just $14.95 and RockLegend for as low as $9.95? Why?

These prices maximise my revenue. Trust me, I tested it :D

I had to click “buy it” links to check out your games prices. Do you think that it helps you sell more games this way?

Possibly. There is some chance that you increase the emotional connection with going through with the purchase by making them click, so they are already closer to a sale once they see the price. I’m not sure about that, because it’s an extra step in the process. I do it because it makes managing price changes and discounts easier.

What will be your next game? When we can expect it?

It still doesn’t 100% have a name yet. It’s a bit of a departure for me in some ways. It’s a space battle management simulator thing. basically you configure a big space fleet and go kick alien ass. It’s not an RTS, at least not yet, and it’s not really turn based either. I’m still a bit nervous about whether my idea for how it works is genius or madness, so I might chicken out and make it a bit of an RTS too. It will be done ‘in 2009′.

Who will survive in the casual game business in 2010?

Big Fish Games, Popcap.
I think I’ve got the full list there.

Really? That’s a scary scenario. Not much developers on that list. Who will make all those games for “a new game everyday” idea at BFG?

BFG.
If I owned BFG, I’d buy all the developers that make my top ten games, and ignore the rest. Thats why I listed Popcap. They are possibly too big to be bought. Maybe there will be a few other devs working for 10% royalties, but they will be part timers or Eastern Europeans.

What is the most important thing for indie developer to do?

Sell your games. Don’t expect other people to sell them. Read a few books on business, marketing and advertising. This stuff is just as important as learning pointers and vertex buffers. In fact it’s much more important.

Can you name three must have books for those that lack business, marketing and advertising skills?

‘The Advertised Mind’
‘Predictably Irrational’
‘The Long Tail’

I recommend watching Dragons Den, if you are in a country that shows it on TV. I’ve read the biographies of most of the dragons, and they are an interesting read too :D

Has portal sales hurt your direct sales?

In some cases yes. In other cases no. It depends a lot on pricing. The danger is that portals undercut you. Not all portals will do that, and you can discuss this with some of them. Some portals just insist on having total freedom to sell your game at whatever price they want, and just give you a percentage. Nobody should do deals like that, and I don’t do them now I’m older and wiser. Thankfully I can tell portals where to stuff their contracts if I don’t like them, and I’ve done it more than once :D.

Do you think there is a win-win solution for portals wars issue?

A win-win for developers too? I don’t see one. Not in casual gaming. The portals have defined the market as being controlled by subscriptions to big publisher websites. The problem is the developers have no leverage, because they are all scared to turn down portal deals. Not only that, the devs help to fuel the situation by actively working as the affiliate arm of the big portals. At this point, the devs only have themselves to blame. My hat is off to Reflexive. They are like Valve, they saw the portalisation coming and made a quick transition to being a publisher. Maybe more devs should have done that. I probably should have.

It seems that you have pretty active forum on your website. How important that forum is for your website? Is it something you would recommend for developers to add to their site?

It’s great, once there are posters, but it’s a lot of maintenance. It’s worth doing, but you need to make a game that will encourage discussion. Modding really helps, and they are a must for strategy games. I think more relevantly, I recommend designing a game where forums are a natural side effect of the design.

I hate advertising because I always feel like the only one that earns money is the Ad Server.  Even if clicks or impressions are not soo expensive it is hard to turn them into profits. Why? Games are either too cheap or too expensive.

But I read a book about AdWords and it gave me some inspiration. I also noticed that Pony World has quite good visitor to download ratio – over 40% of visitors download the game. With that ratio maybe it will not to that hard to turn AdWords into profits?

I created two ad variations for selected keywords and set up a daily budget of a little over $10. And today I got the results (that’s what I love about AdWords – almost instant results).

My ads received 90 clicks total: 51 for ad variation #1and 39 for ad variation #2. CTR for those ads: 1.55% for #1 and 1.22% for #2. Not so bad,  especially one you show it by keywords: the best CTR is 10.38% and the lowest one is 0.77%. The lowest one represents most of impressions and clicks.

Because that’s just 90 clicks I don’t know if it’s profitable yet or not, but we can do some estimations. Let’s go to Google Analytics and check if those clickers download the game. This is where we face first disappointment. Only 19.48% of clickers downloads the game. It’s still much better than what I had for Runes of Avalon campaign where only 11% of visitors downloaded the game.

If Pony World Deluxe has 1% CR (download to sale) then I need 100 downloads to sell one game. And I need 513 clicks to get 100 downloads. 513 clicks will cost me over $68. And I get only $17 out of each sale, so each sale makes me a loss of $51.

Judging just by those numbers you can for sure say that advertising is a waste of money. And it is if you do it wrong. It is if you aim short term. It is if you don’t tweak your ads, your game and your game description web page. It is if you don’t increase your visitor value.

It takes time to turn advertising into profits. Most people are not patient enough.

I made some tweaks to my ads and will do for at least few more days. If I can see improvements then I’ll keep advertising until I make a profit or run out of money :D

Today, for the first time my site conversion was over 1%. Site, not game. That means that 1 of each 100 visitors, not downloaders bought a game from my site, or actually… bought one of my games, since I don’t track affiliate sales in GA.

1.01% site conversion is an average for last 30 days (little update, next day it went up to 1.05%). You can see on the graph it peaks to as high as 2%. Unfortunately there are still days where I sell nothing.

The good thing is that site conversion was not correlated with number of visitors. It means that even in peak times those were quality visits. Obviously, site conversion is correlated with your games conversion. So the better your games convert, the better your site converts.

Interesting peaks
April 1st, Tuesday – 2.17% – well, that was April Fools day – I don’t know if that’s just coincidence but I posted a joke on that day that prices for all my games will rise 10x next day :)

March 23rd, Sunday – 1.96% – I send out newsletters on March 20th

April 4th, Friday – 1.75%

April 8th, Sunday – 1.58%

March 16th, Sunday – 1.39% – well, Sunday is just the day for buying stuff online.

While Sundays have usually high conversion rates it doesn’t mean that I have highest volume of sales on this day. The most busy day is usually Saturday.

First of all, all your buy now links have to call a script that will save Google Analytics cookies to database. To match visitors with cookies we will use visitor IP. The script that will set the cookies on e-commerce domain will delete database entry right after retrieving it. It is not a perfect solution, but it will work in 99.999% (how many orders do you expect placed within few seconds from the same IP?). So instaed of calling:

store.esellerate.net/s.asp?s=STR4587075495&Cmd=BUY&SKURefnum=SKU41198308198

you call

www.yourdamain.com/buy/mygame.php

Mygame.php has to include save_GA_cookies.php script and then redirect to real e-commerce address. save_GA_cookies.php script looks like this:

<?
// this script should be called before you redirect to e-commerce shopping cart
// it saves Google Analytics cookies to database along with User IP

// include your database engine
include(“db.php”)

$dbga = new clsDBAnawiki();$IP = $_ENV[‘REMOTE_ADDR’];

$utma = mysql_escape_string($_COOKIE[‘__utma’]);
$utmb = mysql_escape_string($_COOKIE[‘__utmb’]);
$utmc = mysql_escape_string($_COOKIE[‘__utmc’]);
$utmx = mysql_escape_string($_COOKIE[‘__utmx’]);
$utmz = mysql_escape_string($_COOKIE[‘__utmz’]);
$utmv = mysql_escape_string($_COOKIE[‘__utmv’]);
$utmk = mysql_escape_string($_COOKIE[‘__utmk’]);

$dbga->query(“INSERT INTO an_ga_cookies(ga_ip, ga_utma, ga_utmb, ga_utmc, ga_utmx, ga_utmz, ga_utmv, ga_utmk) VALUES(‘$IP’, ‘$utma’, ‘$utmb’, ‘$utmc’, ‘$utmx’, ‘$utmz’, ‘$utmv’, ‘$utmk’)”);
$dbga->close();

?>

Then you need to insert into your e-commerce html template following line:

<script TYPE=”text/javascript” src=”https://www.yourSSLdomain.com/buy/set_GA_cookies.php” mce_src=”https://www.yourSSLdomain.com/buy/set_GA_cookies.php”>
</script>

set_GA_cookies.php reads GA cookies from database and sets them on e-commerce domain via JavaScript. The problem is that you need a SSL domain address otherwise your shopping cart will show unsecure site message. The good news is that this domain doesn’t have to be on your server or your own domain, though you will need to tweak my code to make it work on 3rd party server.

Here is the code for set_GA_cookies.php:

<?
// script generates JavaScript code that sets Google Analytic cookies on eSellerate.net

// include your own database library
include(“db.php”);

$IP = $_ENV[‘REMOTE_ADDR’];
$db = new DB();

$db->query(“SELECT * FROM an_ga_cookies WHERE ga_ip=’$IP’ LIMIT 0, 1″);

$jscode = ”;
while ($db->next_record()) {
$utma = $db->f(‘ga_utma’);
$utmb = $db->f(‘ga_utmb’);
$utmc = $db->f(‘ga_utmc’);
$utmx = $db->f(‘ga_utmx’);
$utmz = $db->f(‘ga_utmz’);
$utmv = $db->f(‘ga_utmv’);
$utmk = $db->f(‘ga_utmk’);
$id = $db->f(‘ga_id’);

$jscode = “setCookie(‘__utma’, ‘”.htmlspecialchars($utma).”‘, 30, ‘/’, ‘.esellerate.net’, false) \n”;
$jscode .= “setCookie(‘__utmb’, ‘”.htmlspecialchars($utmb).”‘, 30, ‘/’, ‘.esellerate.net’, false) \n”;
$jscode .= “setCookie(‘__utmc’, ‘”.htmlspecialchars($utmc).”‘, 30, ‘/’, ‘.esellerate.net’, false) \n”;
$jscode .= “setCookie(‘__utmx’, ‘”.htmlspecialchars($utmx).”‘, 30, ‘/’, ‘.esellerate.net’, false) \n”;
$jscode .= “setCookie(‘__utmz’, ‘”.htmlspecialchars($utmz).”‘, 30, ‘/’, ‘.esellerate.net’, false) \n”;
$jscode .= “setCookie(‘__utmv’, ‘”.htmlspecialchars($utmv).”‘, 30, ‘/’, ‘.esellerate.net’, false) \n”;
$jscode .= “setCookie(‘__utmk’, ‘”.htmlspecialchars($utmk).”‘, 30, ‘/’, ‘.esellerate.net’, false) \n”;

}

if (!empty($id)) $db->query(“DELETE FROM an_ga_cookies WHERE ga_id=$id”);

?>

function setCookie(name, value, expires, path, domain, secure){
document.cookie=name+’=’+unescape(value||”)+
(expires?';expires=’+new Date(+new Date()+expires*864e5).toGMTString():”)+
(path?';path=’+path:”)+
(domain?';domain=’+domain:”)+
(secure?';secure':”);
}
<? echo $jscode; ?>

That’s it. I used PHP, but you can use any other web language to do that. Commands are self-explanatory, so I am sure you’ll be fine. Just in case you don’t want to copy the code from this page you can download zipped scripts.

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.

Google wants you to attract more of the traffic you are looking for, and help you turn more visitors into customers.

Use Google Analytics to learn which online marketing initiatives are cost effective and see how visitors actually interact with your site. Make informed site design improvements, drive targeted traffic, and increase your conversions and profits.

Google Analytics is a free tracking tool (though some argue about it and say it’s an exchange deal – you let them know how big is your site, they let you use their software). Installation process is quite simple. You need to go to http://www.google.com/analytics/ and set up a Google account, or if you have a Google account just sign in and Google will create Analytics service for you.

The next step is to add website profile. Google will show you tracking code. All you need to do is to copy this code into your website footer (I hope you do use templates). After Google verifies placement of tracking code you are ready to go. Come back next day and check out what it was able to track. If you see no data, it means you did something wrong.

The best thing about Google Analytics is that you place just one piece of code and it detects which pages on your site are the most popular. This is something not every commercial soft offers. You can easily find out that ie. “your game description page” is the most popular page on your website and what’s more – you can find out how people go to this page (search engine traffic, referrals, direct entries, etc.).

Setting up Google Analytics is almost done. The important step is to set up goals. This will be covered in the next post.

I started to ask myself why is this happening. My games are great (don’t they? ;-)) so what’s wrong? Am I the only one that likes my game?

I started to read various blogs regarding making money online. No, not to make money selling ads, but to learn how to improve my website. When I finally got some results I decided to write few articles to help you find the right way.

So you want to know how to get more sales without spending a penny?

First of all, you need to know who is visiting your site and what one is doing. You need a good tracking tool. Because you don’t want to spend a penny, you can use Google Analytics (GA). That’s what I use and it works great. Installing Google Analytics is easy, so I won’t go deep into this topic today.

When you get GA working the next thing you need to do is to set goals. I recommend setting two goals, but you can have up to four. First one should be game download. Second one, game purchase.

I advise you to install same goal tracking code on all download pages. I assume that you have some kind of a page: “You are downloading…” and then this page is redirecting to binary file.

Google Analytics will track how many downloads you have and what is your site conversion to goal (CRd). What is even more important, GA can report this in depth, so you can find out CRs for each referral. This will let you choose sites that have quality traffic and you can invest some more money into advertising on those sites.

Tracking purchases ain’t that easy. Most of us make use of a 3-rd party shopping cart. I use eSellerate.net. A lot of people uses Plimus, BMT Micro, etc. If you want to track your orders you need to contact your e-commerce provider. eSellerate did a great job for me implementing GA.

You can meet a problem here. Your e-commerce provider my not let you redirect your customer to your site (thank you page), so you lose referral information. You can workaround this by using a mix of PHP and JS script that sets GA cookies on e-commerce service domain. I wrote that script for eSellerate and if you want I can send it to you (I’ll write an article about this later).

When all is set and working you need to wait a little bit to get some data. After that take a look at following metrics:

• visitors to download conversion (CRv2d)
• visitors to purchase conversion (CRv2p)
• download to purchase conversion (CRd2p)
• bounce ratio

You can improve each of this metrics. If you succeed improving it, you will get more sales without spending a penny. How to do that? You need to use Google Website Optimizer. You can read about one of my experiments in the post Improving Runes of Avalon website. In the nearest future I will talk about how you can make such experiments using Google Website Optimizer on your own.