Category: business

If you run a website, especially if you use any marketing or advertising, it’s very handy to know where your actual positive, interested, enthusiastic visitors are coming from. People who bounce into your page and then go ‘meh’ and bounce out, are probably not worth concentrating on. One way to do this, is by looking at the bounce rate (people who visited just one page). Thankfully, google analytics lets you dig deeper. Here is how to see which sources are sending you traffic that view 3 or more different pages of your site before leaving.

Firstly, here is the standard view of ‘all traffic sources’ under analytics.

I can see my top traffic referrers here, and see which ones have a high or low bounce rate. To get more complex data we need to hit that ‘advanced segments’ button at the top. Then we need to select ‘Create a new advanced segment’. That will take us to the segment editing interface. You can drag and drop items from the left to the right.  Under Dimensions, then visitors, you will find ‘page depth’. drag it over and set the condition as shown

Now when you return to the traffic sources screen, you can select more than one segment (from that same ‘advanced segments’ box). You can view the high-page depth visitors alongside all visits, to get a breakdown on which sites are sending the more-interested traffic. GA happily shows you in green the percentage of all visits that my page-depth3 users are in. It also adds a new line to the graph. This is especially handy if you get a massive sudden spike, from some review or ad campaign, or mention on a web comic. You can see easily whether it’s a spike of ‘meh’ traffic or a spike of really valuable traffic.

This won’t make you sell more games immediately, but it will give you more information, and that’s always good. Nothing beats hard data, and it could be that the ads you bought on that obscure manga site are actually paying off big time (or not at all). It only takes 5 minutes to set this stuff up. There is much much more you can do with segments, if you dig around. I hope this just encourages a few people to play with them. Unless you are a real analytics geek, you may not have even noticed that button at all.

Here is the talk I gave last year about making money from indie games. Ignore my crappy powerpoint slides, I explain it all anyway. I hate the open document format. Proprietary software FTW :D

World of Love: Cliff Harris from Mudlark on Vimeo.

Here is a question for indie game developers.

Who are you competing against, and who is on your side?

It’s not as simple a question as you might think. Don’t rush to judgement. I find that the supposedly simple questions are in fact the most interesting. I can list a lot of people on my side, and a lot of people who compete with me, and some people who are in both lists. The people in both lists are what I’m pretentiously calling competing allies.

Imagine a fellow PC indie strategy game developer. Lets call them ‘Cunning Fox Games’. CF Games earn about the same as I do, and sell direct online. We probably have some crossover of customers, with people owning games from both of us. Are CF Games on my side? or my competition.

They are both.

A customer of CF Games has been identified (maybe at some marketing cost) by that company. The identity of that customer has worth. They already own CFG’s games, but possibly not mine. I would benefit a lot from CFG telling their customers about me. And the reverse is true. In other words, if me and CFG mention each other, we can BOTH make more sales, and be better off.  So far, so obvious.

But let’s say I mention CF Games, and they don’t mention me back. Maybe their CEO met me once and thinks I’m a bastard, and doesn’t want to give me any publicity. Maybe I know this. Should I still keep recommending them?

Yes

And for purely rational self-interest, too. I *want* people who enjoy my games to buy games from CF Games too. I can’t make 3 games a year, but my customers can buy 3. Why not become known as someone who recommends good, relevant games? Why not encourage those players to keep playing strategy games? Why not encourage them to keep buying indie games? and to buy them direct from the developers. In the long run, this grows the market for me too. The more people who are used to using BMTMicro, the better.

Some small businesspeople can be very small minded. They keep an eye on fellow small businesses and treat them as the enemy, but that’s just wrong. If you sell indie games, I’m not your competition, I’m your ally. Activision sell 1,000 times more games than you and me combined, and frankly, I’d rather have a beer with you and swap ideas, strategies and business tips with a fellow indie, whose experience is directly relevant than some CEO who never plays games anyway.

So my tip of the day, is remember, sometimes helping rival companies helps you too. It’s not a zero-sum game.

There are various ways to sell sequels to games. I’ve sold 2 sequels myself (Democracy 2 and Kudos 2). The approach I took was this:

• Take what’s good about the original game, and expand upon it.
• Fix any of the design or technical limitations of the original that were too big to just patch.
• Add some new features, and polish the stuff that is already there. Maybe with a bigger budget this time.
• Respond to tons of real paying-customer feedback to make changes and improvements to the user experience.

In short, make a better version of the game.

Or of course, you can be cynical as an ambulance-chasing lawyer, and just turn off the servers for last years version, and then sell the same game again with some extra bump maps and a new logo.

Seriously, running game servers is cheap. How do people think all those FreeToPlay games cope? This is so, so cynical.

Ok, so we all know that I am older than Elrond*, so I’m more likely to be ‘un-cool’ and buy stuff on an older format anyway, but having just bought a CD, I think my reasoning is pretty sound.

First, I have a partner with a car that has no mp3 player, so having a CD means I can play it in her car.

Secondly, I still have 2 CD players in the house. (maybe 3, now I think about it), and this way I can play the music in those, as well as on my PC.

Thirdly, I can always rip the CD to mp3 format anyway, and get all the benefits of mp3 playback.

Fouthly, I’m an ex-muso-snob with good hearing, and CD’s sound better than most mp3s.

These are pretty specific to the CD vs MP3 format, but one of the other reasons was more applicable to buying anything online, and even applicable to indie gaming.

Basically, I heard some music on a TV ad or show (can’t even remember) and it was by a guy who I heard sing news year eve on TV, and pushed me over the edge into thinking “yup, I’l; get that album”, While I thought this, I had a laptop, and a cat sat on my legs, preventing movement. The laptop didn’t have itunes installed, and frankly installing itunes annoys the fuck out of me.

Itunes wants to be in charge of me. I am the humble customer, and it knows best. It will insist on running all the time, as a windows service, whether I like it or not. It thinks it’s desire to run 24/7 is more important than my desire to have my machine setup slimmed down and reliable. Fuck that.
So I don’t have itunes on this PC. I do, however have a web browser, so I went to amazon and ordered the CD. It was easy, done in 2 clicks, and I didn’t have to install any clients, or run any software in order to get what I paid for.

In a sense, I just did the music equivalent of buying a PC game direct and getting a direct .exe link in return. It was way less hassle, and very satisfying, and also very encouraging, because obviously, this is what I do with Positech, as opposed to inflicting a ‘client’ on people, and it’s good to see that it has bonuses for the buyer.

Plus it was only £2 :D

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