Its very frustrating to not know if your ads work. I also know that you can never truly correlate these things, but I guess I enjoy trying. With that in mind lets look at 8 days of Production Line sales and marketing
| Sales |
Marketing |
Net profit |
| $1,140.00 |
$351.94 |
$389.06 |
| $1,283.00 |
$306.24 |
$527.71 |
| $1,453.00 |
$362.78 |
$581.67 |
| $999.00 |
$583.09 |
$66.26 |
| $934.00 |
$0.00 |
$607.10 |
| $796.00 |
$0.00 |
$517.40 |
| $916.00 |
$0.00 |
$595.40 |
| s$936.00 |
$0.00 |
$608.40 |
There are taxes, distributors cuts etc which explains the lower amount you see as net profit. In any case, is there *any* correlation here? A fairly crude approximation shows average profit when I have no marketing running is $582 versus $391 when I’m running ads. Yikes. Obviously its not that simple. Firstly the ads could be adding to my wishlists and thus further sales. Or I could be generating more facebook likes. Its so complex.
if I look at visits to the steam store page for production line and add that in I get this:
| Sales |
Marketing |
Net profit |
visits |
| $1,140.00 |
$351.94 |
$389.06 |
357 |
| $1,283.00 |
$306.24 |
$527.71 |
295 |
| $1,453.00 |
$362.78 |
$581.67 |
342 |
| $999.00 |
$583.09 |
$66.26 |
515 |
| $934.00 |
$0.00 |
$607.10 |
122 |
| $796.00 |
$0.00 |
$517.40 |
86 |
| $916.00 |
$0.00 |
$595.40 |
96 |
| $936.00 |
$0.00 |
$608.40 |
122 |
Which suggests that I am at least successfully driving traffic with the ads. However, the percentage of visits to the store page that come from external sites over that period is only 22%. In other words, I really should be scaling any boost in sales (if there was one) by 0.22 anyway. I can see that I’ve managed to peak that share of visits from external sites to 38% on the 7th August, at a cost of about $480. Hmmm
So what can be learned?
a) My suspicion that direct attribution of ads->sales is difficult to correlate certainly seems true.
b) You can probably double your visits to your steam store page for about $600/day.
You really can’t learn much from 8 days data. I’m trying to resist the temptation to advertise more for a few more days so I have a better dataset (I have ad-spending data going back about 30 days before I stopped).
I have a suspicion that the cost to generate enough ‘loss-leading’ traffic to push the games popularity up to the point where it gets noticed by steams algorithms and thus starts to generate sales from within steam at a higher rate is quite high. I’m digging into the stats of all of my games to try and work out how many extra sales I need to push PL into the top 10 ‘topsellers’ among indie strategy games…
Yup, this is all very small fry. I’m trying to find a winning strategy before I start shovelling wheelbarrows full of marketing dollars at it :D