Sell More Games

Cross-selling is a simple trick for selling more (at least in the online world). Here is the definition of cross-selling on the web:

The strategy of pushing new products to current customers based on their past purchases. Cross-selling is designed to widen the customer’s reliance on the company and decrease the likelihood of the customer switching to a competitor.

Or easier to understand:

Cross-selling is the term used to describe the sale of additional products or services to a customer.

The trick is that you need at least two products to cross-sell. If someone decides to buy your game it is much easier to convince him or her to purchase an extra item. It’s good to offer a discount when cross-selling.

If you want to maximize your revenues try to cross-sell similar products. Offer a sequel or another game from the same genre.

Once I analyze my sales data I’ll post some stats regarding my results on cross-selling.

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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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Tracking your visitors is very important. If you don’t know who is visiting your site, where is coming from or what are your most popular pages then you are not able to improve your website. What is even worse, you don’t know if a change on your website has a positive or negative impact on your traffic. There are various options available for website owners, from free to commercial. For a long time I have been using commercial software, but it didn’t give me information I needed. And then I found Google Analytics.

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.

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I, just like many developers here, was suffering due to lack of sales. Creating games is fun, but when your game is done, you put in on your website and then wait… wait… and sometimes sales come, but mostly not.

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.

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