Yeah, I know, I’m a wee bit late on these. But on the plus side my project at my day job is close to three months late, so if you grade me on a curve I’m almost two and a half months early… or at least thats the math I try to use with my manager.
The same disclaimers apply as every other stats post.
Summary: November was a bad month for sales, principally due to Thanksgiving I think (I got essentially nothing after the 20th.) December I also predict is going to be terrible. I’ll cover the Google costs but not much more.
Sales: 20(+ 1 refund — customer ordered twice)
Gross Sales: $499
Net Sales After Paypal: ~$479
Expenses:
GoDaddy: $10
e-junkie: $5
Google AdWords: $90
Amigo: $25
Net Expenses: $130
Net Profit: $349
I don’t think I ever commented on how Amigo turned out for me. Well, to put it mildly: not well. I finally was successful in getting newsletters to take my ad after Carson Systems started promoting Amigo heavily (incidentally, this was AFTER I had forgotten about it — must remember to cancel such things in the future). Unfortunately, there is no geotargetting or language targetting in Amigo, and I only received clicks from principally two large Spanish (i.e. the country, south of France) newsletters. They don’t play bingo in Spain. Average time spent on site by those visitors: 3 seconds. My advice, and I have the utmost respect for Carson Systems and was very impressed that they actually sent me a mail inquiring about my experience when I put in a feature request for targetting, is to stay away from this service for now.
OK, time for some website stats. You are going to notice these are substantially above normal — I recently started ranking for some very common queries on Google (including for bingo cards , which gets some SCARY search volume relative to the Long Tail queries I usually rank on) and as a result the amount of traffic I have from Google is literally double what it usually is. I don’t know if this will be sustained (hope so) or if this new traffic will eventually convert to sales (hope so), but I’ve seen the increase in downloads and update requests I would expect from it being legitimate traffic.
Visits: 4,700
Average: 2.25 views per visitor
Major referrers:
Google (organic): 1,600
Google (AdWords): 750
Direct: 750
MSN: 465
Yahoo: 300
this blog: 180
Every other site (BoS, download sites, pirate sites, teacher forums, etc): <100 each, 600 or so in aggregate
Conversion Rates:
Google (organic): 16% (my lowest conversion — not suprising as some of the recent search terms are not exactly targetted traffic)
Google (AdWords): 29% (remember, Analytics overstates this — I think the true number is about 25%, mostly because I focus on CPA like a maniac)
Direct: 21% (not bad, not bad — and remember, an additional 20% of them followed the update link from within the app so you wouldn’t expect them to need the trial download, so the true CR is closer to 25%)
MSN: 19%
Yahoo: 21%
In historical terms, I consider visitors-to-download conversion of 20% to be acceptable and 25% to be my goal.
Downloads:
My site: 890
Offsite: Uh, clueless, sorry. I’ve got no desire to spend enough time to grep for this data today. I’m going to go out on a limb and say its probably about 500-800.
Confirmed Successful Installs: 225 (Customer opts in to a “check for updates” from within the app)
Estimated Trial-to-Purchase Conversion: 1.25% to 1.5% Some uISVs would consider this successful. As stated, for me, this month was a bit of a disappointment. I would feel better about that number if it were in the 2% region somewhere. It is possible that if Google continues sending me weakly qualified visitors relative to my usual focused traffic that I may have to adjust to the reality and lower my expectations.
Conversion Given That Customer Has Entered The Funnel: In excess of 60%. Ahem, booyah. There are some major merchants who would die for a 40% cart abandonment rate. I like to think this is because I keep the process as easy as humanly possible (enter your info, click confirm, congratulations you’re done) and use a name which is quite trusted in my market, Paypal.
Fun Navigational Trivia: You may want to take a look at my purchasing page to make sense of this. All of my customers this month who purchased purchased through Paypal. I’m going to tell you what exactly they clicked on the page to get to Paypal, and what I can essentially count on earning for any given click on that interface element (i.e. rate of conversion * sale price). In order from most popular to least popular:
- The sidebar “Purchase Now $24.95″ button. Expected Value: $5.98
- The words “Purchase a single copy”. Expected Value: $15.95
- The credit card button directly adjacent the “Purchase a single copy” hyperlink. Expected Value: $5.98
- The credit card button following my paen to Paypal’s security. Expected Value: $11.97
I wouldn’t draw any very deep inferences from 3/4 since they’ve got very, very low sample sizes.
