Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Web stats again

cliffski

In my never ending quest to have 1% of the metrics-obsession of zynga, I’m going to just brain dump loads of web stats and see if anyone can drawn more epic conclusions than I can.

For the last two weeks (27th feb – 12th march), here are some analytics web stats for positech.co.uk

There were 32,500 visits, and the bounce rate was 66%.

32% was direct traffic, which is interesting becauise I’d assume that was forum stuff, but the forums aren’t tagged by analytics at all. Weirdly, the top content for direct visits, with 10% of the total is the Kudos homepage. I bet this is a link through some [code] tags on a pirate site, hence no referrer. Oh joy.

If I look at new visitors, their top destination is Gratuitous Space Battles.

If I look, in general at visitors to the GSB homepage, the bounce rate is 44% which isn’t so bad. 24% of those who stay go to the demo page next, which is also a good sign.

When looking at the demo page itself, 18% of people bail out here, the top move for people who don’t is the demo download link, other people visit other parts of the site. That’s pretty good.

The second most popular page on my site is the positech homepage itself. It has a bounce rate of 45%, which could be lower, considering there are so many possible destinations from there. Scarily, the top destination from the homepage is actually this lil ol blog here. Very surprising, I’d expected the top result there to be GSB. Should this bother me?

Quite a few people click the small icons going to pages for affiliate sales. Harvest:Massive encounter got over 200 clicks in 14 days. There were zero sales, and generally affiliate sales are very low. I am strongly minded to remove all that from the front page, and concentrate on my own games, especially as I now have showmethegames to promote the general indie scene.

Looking at visitors, I can see that firefox is #1, followed by chrome. Internet explorer has just 23.8% of visitors. Specs-wise, the most common screen res is a scarily low 1024×768, followed by 1280×800. This seems to me that it is mostly laptop and netbook surfers. I surf a lot on my laptop, but work on a massive four trillion pixel monitor.

Demographics wise the top visitors are from the US, then UK, Canada, Germany, This is all good, and due to me changing the settings on my ad-campaigns no doubt.  Stats are awesome, the top state is California, and the top city is San francisco. You SF surfers are busy, with a shorter time on site than average :D. Scarily, if I look just at users who visited the GSB buy page, the #2 country is Brazil. I can’t find any sales to Brazil, so one can onyl hope thiose Brazilians tell their German friends they should check out the game…

I know… I need to get a life or something :D

7 thoughts on Web stats again

  1. “Scarily, the top destination from the homepage is actually this lil ol blog here. Very surprising, I’d expected the top result there to be GSB. Should this bother me?”

    That seems reasonable to me, and is actually scarily close to the ways I’ve used your site. I leave a tab open on the forums, so that’s direct when I open my browser (no referrer), I go directly to the GSB page if I need GSB related things (as I suspect people will if searching for the game on Google), and the last few times I’ve been to your homepage have been to get a link to your blog :-)

    Honestly, if I want game info I never go to the developer/publisher’s homepage, I just go straight to the pages about the game.

  2. Well, if you don’t like people reading your blog then you shouldn’t write such interesting things! ;)
    For some reason I’ve never got round to bookmarking your blog, so it’s become a habit for me just to go via the homepage.

  3. I’m the same as CountVlad. It has a side effect of me seeing when new things are released (Although you’ve never not posted it on the blog, so meh.) Never learned the URL of your blog, but I can remember the positech name.

  4. Maybe you can use the differences in demographics?
    Use some nice german-only discount or put a flag there or something? :-)

    I would say to promote SMTG instead of some small other gamse is a very good idea.

    And for the browsers: FF4 won’t get on top of Chrome 10 (and I’m not a version number bitch) – and I don’t want to start a browser war here :-) .
    But really: if google isn’t doing anything stupid nobody will stop Chrome. :-)

  5. Agreed regarding Chrome. Even with the tab memory hogging (which on a technicality isn’t classed as a memory leak, though it is getting better with new versions), it’s still lighterweight and faster responding than Firefox. I was resistant to changing, but I’m glad I did.

    Also, it can be updated without freaking out. Ever upgraded firefox while it’s still open? Most of the UI is dynamically loaded (for some reason), so suddenly nothing works. You can’t save the tabs you’re on because the usual dialog doesn’t work. You can’t bookmark the pages you’re on usually either. Half the time I ended up manually copying the addresses out, the other times I just chalked it up to experience and gave up.

    Oops, that turned into a bit of a rant there. Anyway, a lot of kudos to Mozilla for showing people that IE wasn’t the only way to go, but your browser just isn’t good for me anymore.

  6. Cliff, I sent you an e-mail. It looks like your robots.txt file is redirecting to a 404, which may be causing Google not to index your blog entries correctly.

  7. Hi Cliff

    I have played most of your game demos and bought one. I generally look at your main page to see if there are any new games and if there aren’t they I refer to your blog to see if you are developing any new ones. Also I find a lot of your posts quite interesting and it’s a good insight into a independent games company and its struggles in the mire of giant video game companies that tend to same ol’shit, pardon my french.
    Although I must say, I gotta be quite simple because i can’t make head or tails of GSB! Maybe my PC is just too old to handle it.
    Keep it going!
    P

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