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

Using advanced segments in google analytics

Posted on January 16, 2011

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.

google analytics segments

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

google analytics segments

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.

google analytics segments

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.

Lets design the novel from scratch, for 2011.

Posted on January 14, 2011

I have chatted to various people who dabble in virtual novels / interactive fiction. I hear not much money is made, but this surprises me. I am assuming that nobody has really done it right yet.

Take all this with a pinch of salt, because I rarely read novels, I prefer businessy / pop-sciency or historical reading. But here goes.

Firstly, a 2011 virtual-novel needs to be extensively hyperlinked. If I’m reading about a character, and I forget who the hell they are, I should be able to hover over their name and be reminded. I tend to read novels in short bursts. I always forget who is who. Especially in novels like catch 22, with 400 characters in

Secondly, a 2011 virtual novel should never, ever have me confused, or out of the loop. I guess the old fashioned way books handled this was footnotes, and I can see how they might have seemed a bit jarring in terms of layout. However, this is the time of hyperlinking, so we have basically solved all that.  Say your story is set is Rome, would it hurt to have a map of rome in the book? maybe a huge, detailed one?

Thirdly, the 2011 virtual novel should be a two way process in terms of feedback. Books really lack this. Shouldn’t it be trivial to send feedback to the author? The best example I have here is Iain M Banks. He is a great ‘big concept’ sci-fi writer, who is also a bit sick and twisted. Frankly, I hate the sick and twisted bits, and sometimes even skip them. I don’t want to read sci fi novels to feel scared or horrified, just amazed and interested is fine. I’d love to find an automated way to convey this to him. For all I know, EVERYONE reading his novels feels the same way, but they keep buying them, so he doesn’t know.

Fourthly, the 2011 virtual novel should have some sort of optional community interaction. Once I’ve watched a movie, I often surf to wikipedia or imdb to see what people think of it, and how it was described. Sometimes there are whole subtexts to movies I miss out on, or vital bits of background to characters that escaped my attention. I’d love access to that sort of post-novel discussion within the novel itself.

All of my suggestions are likely rubbish, but one thing is true. The novel will change as a result of technology, we just don’t know exactly how yet. What are your guesses as to what will happen?

Faster internet. Errr… yay?

Posted on January 13, 2011

People who follow me on twitter will have got used to my ranting about my internet connection woes up until a few weeks ago. Basically I was getting random disconnects, and sometimes failure to re-synch the ADSL for several hours at a time. For an internet business, this is far from ideal.

Eventually, after not one but two BT engineer visits, the problem was resolved. To this day, nobody really knows what it was, but I strongly suspect there was some corroded, crappy wiring at the point where the wire from the telephone pole connects to the house. As this is outside the master socket, it’s BT’s problem, so they replaced something up there, and my connection has been perfect ever since.

Not only that, it’s been faster. And not a bit faster, almost twice as fast, from an average of 3MB to an average of 7MB. Wahey.

I have to say though, that it doesn’t really matter. I don’t buy and download many big games, I don’t download any movies, and cool though the iplayer is, TV has been crap lately, and watching it on a laptop sucks anyway. So for me, I conclude that any internet speed above 2MB is probably just academic.

In other news, I added a new interview to my little side-site showmethegames here:

http://www.showmethegames.com/puppygames_interview.php

And I am working away merrily on my next big game. I’m currently in the ‘trying hard to visualise the finished product’ phase. I’m a LONG way off showing anything, or even describing it.

Competing allies

Posted on January 9, 2011

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.