About a week ago I merged Daily Bingo Cards and Bingo Card Creator, and embarked on a massive site redesign.  I thought I would write a bit about how this improved my numbers.  I have compared traffic to the combined total of the two sites — all other comparisons are against Bingo Card Creator itself, because I am lazy.  These are not rigorously devised statistics — they’re my quick eyeball of typical statistics for a weekday.

Visitors: 900 -> 1,200

Pages per Visit: 2.5 -> 3.5

Time per visit: 90 seconds -> 150 seconds

Trial Downloads: 100 -> 125 to 150 (hasn’t settled yet)

Confirmed Application Installs: 20-25 -> 30-40 (hasn’t settled yet)

Sales: 2 -> slightly under 1.

I’m sort of at a loss as to what is causing the sales to go down.  Its possible that is just natural fluctuation, as all of the pre-sales indicators are way the heck up.  I also might have some folks working through the trial pipeline who remember the old branding and get turned off by the new design (“This isn’t the right site!” is a very serious worry in my market). 

A graphic on how well the design focuses user attention, stolen shamelessly from my page on <a href=”http://www.bingocardcreator.com/bingo-cards/holidays/st-patrick” onclick=”javascript:_gaq.push([‘_trackEvent’,’outbound-article’,’http://www.bingocardcreator.com’]);”s-day”>St. Patrick’s Day bingo</a> and courtesy of CrazyEgg (I just upgraded to their $19/month plan because I’m getting too much traffic for the $9 plan to be useful — please, God, send me more problems like that one).  (This image will almost certainly be truncated by WordPress.  Click to see the full sized version.)

St. Patrick's Day click tracking

And one more, because images are fun.  Caution: this isn’t the best test in the world, because I did some significant changes to the sidebar several times while the test was running, and when element IDs change sometimes CrazyEgg “loses” the clicks from some of the views.  (This is so that you don’t see big red splotches where page elements no longer exist, obviously, but it also means that most of the clicks on those buttons aren’t getting shown.)

CrazyEgg analytics of front page

Alright, back to my favorite Saturday activity: doing taxes!  (I got the uISV part done already.  It came out to a bit over $800 on $6,300 odd of profits.  Now I’ve just got to collect a bunch of statements documenting less than $100 in interest and then fill out a bunch of boring administrivia forms.)