For a long time I’ve been painfully aware about how much my purchase tracking sucks, due to the following reasons:
- Google analytics tracking across domains (buy page site and main site) sucks.
- A lot of people buy from steam, or elsewhere anyway, and I can’t edit those buy pages to add tracking.
I’ve finally started basic attempts to put in place a more robust system, which much more accurately tracks ad-clicks (or other link data, theoretically) to confirmed sales. The procedure is essentially this:
- Direct adverts to a php version of the page, not html
- Have that ad pass in a url variable to indicate the source (or theoretically just grab the referrer)
- The php then stores that data in a cookie
When a purchased copy of the game runs for the first time, it finds the cookie (this bit is tricky) and then pings my server to say ‘advert #3323 just resulted in a sale’. This is all done anonymously, so there is no user tracking, just an indication that there was a confirmed sale, rather than just crossing my fingers. If the customer blocks the game from contacting the server, that no big deal, but my last 2 games have some online features, so it’s unlikely.
It will be a while before I have any actual data to show for this, but it should make for less random marketing decisions once I have some, and I’ll share what I have learned. Many thanks to cas for prompting me to do this stuff :D