I was gonna finish this devlog entry, but every Buy Now button on our site broke. brb.
OK, back. Our buttons work again.
The investigation continues...Having eliminated two causes of death, the investigators begin to check off the rest, simultaneously communicating how cool murder investigation is with the debonair attitude of professionals who've done more interesting things before breakfast.Our product isn't a good enough gamebook.Not enough people want gamebooks, period.- Not enough people who want gamebooks know we exist.
- There aren't enough people who want it on desktop.
Reason 3. Not enough people who want gamebooks know we exist.Watson looked askance at his charge. "I know better than to assume you haven't thought this through," he said, at once casual and deliberate. "But are we going about these theories in just the right order?"
"Whatever do you mean, Watson?" Holmes replied.
"Well, don't we know the fourth theory is true? We looked at the usage numbers for Appointment with F.E.A.R. on Steam, and they seemed to prove our desktop hypothesis correct."
"Seemed to, of course, being the operative phrase," Holmes said, picking at his fingernails with a ballpoint pen. "I hope you didn't assume that that little extrapolation we did was the final word on the matter."
"Well, extrapolations are always somewhat prone to differences in genre and something similar to sampling bias," Watson said with a thoughtful air. "But it seemed pretty clear that, within broad parameters, the estimation was correct."
Holmes looked knowingly at Watson. "From what I can tell, there is nonetheless still at least an order of magnitude difference in the sales figures of our victim and those of the games we've looked at. And besides which, there is a more important rule to follow."
He continued without waiting for a response. "Always investigate the avenue that requires the least coding first."This is quite possible. Google Analytics says destinyquestinfinite.com has a few hundred visitors a month. Granted, somewhere around
50% of them are going to our Buy Now page, which is amazing, but even if every single visitor to our site bought the book, we would hardly have a satisfactory amount of sales.
So to prove this isn't the reason we're selling so few copies, we're going to have to get a larger, five-digit number, looking at our homepage. If the numbers don't improve after that, then maybe we'll be able to cross this suspect off our list.
How will we do that? Stay tuned for more DQI Mysteries...
The investigation continues... (part 2)Perhaps the nicest thing about launching first on our website, instead of an app store, is that you can see exactly who visited your website, and
when they left. Did we lose customers because they can't pay in USD? Because the price was too expensive? Because they don't like the color brown?
Google Analytics tracks all this. If you have a homepage that you plan to use for anything more than giving press something to read, I'd highly recommend installing it or something like it. We used that data to start narrowing down our suspects.
In our last episode, we determined that if we got 10-100x more visitors on our website, that would get us enough visitors to get a decent number of purchases (or prove that visitors are not our problem). However, through Analytics, we realized that, before we try fishing in a bigger pond, we should fix our net.
Fixing our netWhen we did our analysis of Google Analytics data, we discovered something interesting. About 90% of our UK visitors were leaving right on the buy now page. Did they leave when they saw the price was in dollars?
We saw a similar pattern at the checkout page - people would leave just before checking out. Were they confused by the address forms, since they weren't in the same form in their country as they are in the US? Were they worried about foreign currency fees?
We decided to add some extra words to support our overseas users, before continuing on the goal of getting 50k visitors. Our new lists of suspects to eliminate:
Our product isn't a good enough gamebook.Not enough people want gamebooks, period.- Customers don't understand or are overwhelmed by the purchasing process.
- Many customers are from countries where they can't purchase our product.
- Not enough people who want gamebooks know we exist.
- There aren't enough people who want it on desktop.
- People don't have enough money since it's the holidays.
- The price is too high for what people want to pay.
- People are waiting for reviews before they buy.
- People are waiting for the official launch, for the bugs to be fixed and Acts 1-3 to be ready.
"But Holmes," Watson said, "doesn't this contradict our previous statement, that we should always choose the option that requires less coding?"
"That would certainly be true," Holmes said, puffing on his pipe, "if the options did not interact with each other. And in the case of mobile purchasing vs. more advertising, that is somewhat true. But here, if we bring more people to the website, only to find that they can't purchase the book in their currency, we would be driving fish to a net with holes in it."
Watson was about to protest that bringing people to a site with no mobile option would be driving fish to a net with holes in it just as certainly as bringing people to a website that didn't accept a proper currency. Knowing Holmes would be unlikely to listen, he held his tongue, considering the possibility of subtly doing some additional marketing on his own.The investigation continues... (part 3)(October 8, 2015)
Finally, the full game is out! We got a lot of great write-ups, some
good reviews, and
a mention on GeekDad. No more sales than before though.
The question still remains: where are the customers? Back to our list of theories.
Our product isn't a good enough gamebook.Not enough people want gamebooks, period.Customers don't understand or are overwhelmed by the purchasing process.- Many customers are from countries where they can't purchase our product.
- Not enough people who want gamebooks know we exist.
- There aren't enough people who want it on desktop, and off Steam.
- People don't have enough money since it's the holidays.
- The price is too high for what people want to pay.
People are waiting for reviews before they buy.People are waiting for the official launch, for the bugs to be fixed and Acts 1-3 to be ready.- People want to play offline.
(We also ruled out purchasing process, since those people would at least be on the website to begin with, so we would see a lot of cart failures on Google Analytics.)
So, what now? Onto Steam and Android, I suppose?
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