(Images in this post may be truncated by Wordpress. Click to see in a new window.)
Oh, yeah, April happened. The capsule summary: week-long holidays like Easter hurt like crazy — I had exactly one sale during Holy Week. We’re also fast approaching the end of the school year and I can feel orders slowing down quite a bit from their usual clip in May, so I wouldn’t expect awesome times ahead. On the plus side, I’m guaranteed to continue covering costs and will probably eek out enough profits to continue bankrolling Kalzumeus.
Sales: 26 (no refunds, 4 CDs — memo to self, find out why those aren’t selling well anymore)
Gross Income: $668.70
Expenses:
GoDaddy: $7
E-junkie: $5
CrazyEgg: $9 (technically only a sliver of that is in April but, eh, who’s counting)
Paypal: $12.50
SwiftCD: $30.56
AdWords: $61.01
Total Expenses: $125
Total Profit: $544
Traffic-wise, things were all over the map. My numbers on Holy Week declined almost as low as they did during the Christmas vacation. I’ve been trying a few things with AdWords (you might notice from the higher expenditures), some of which worked and some of which did not. (Advertising directly on a competing site did not. Constant improvement on the main campaign did. Content network did, to my surprise.)
Rather than spending time copying numbers by hand from Analytics I’m going to be lazy and just paste what it shows me for the month. For those of you unfamiliar with the interface: G1, G2, and G3 refer to configurable goals and the percentage of visitors from a particular source who complete them. In my case, G1 is purchasing something from me (note this understates my actual number of customers by 50%, due to some issues people seem to be having with reaching the page that tracks this), G2 is downloading my trial, and G3 is confirming the installation of the trial (by requesting an update for it).
I generally make most of my decisions based on the G2 column (i.e. free trials downloaded). The reason for this is subtle: if a person comes to my site, downloads the trial, closes out of their browser, then runs the trial, and later conversions (such as a purchase or check for updates) typically get filed under “direct”. They typically use the link in the application to arrive at my site, and from Analytic’s limited view of the world thats the same as typing www.bingocardcreator.com “direct”ly into your browser.
As you can see, my most promising prospects are the ones I get from AdWords. Organic traffic from Google is the largest segment of my traffic, accounting for about half of it, but their conversion rates are pretty poor. That is unsuprising if you look at what people are searching for when they get to me — typically I perform fairly poorly in terms of conversion rates on the high traffic queries like “bingo cards” and very well on long tail queries like, well, why don’t I show you some:
In a very Long Tail-esque moment, I get about 30% of my Google hits and trial downloads from the top 10 search terms. Its 3:30 AM so I won’t do too much math on what the breakdown is for midlist search terms versus the Long Tail shown above, but my naiive guesstimate is that probably one third of my downloaders are from the top 10 search terms, one third are from less common but still fairly popular search terms, and one third are looking for a phrase that only exists for them. I could show you pages and pages and pages that look like the above image.
