{"id":4666,"date":"2017-08-12T10:59:27","date_gmt":"2017-08-12T09:59:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/?p=4666"},"modified":"2017-08-12T10:59:27","modified_gmt":"2017-08-12T09:59:27","slug":"more-messing-with-marketing-stats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/2017\/08\/12\/more-messing-with-marketing-stats\/","title":{"rendered":"More messing with marketing stats"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/p>\n\n\n<\/colgroup>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Sales<\/td>\nMarketing<\/td>\nNet profit<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
$1,140.00<\/td>\n$351.94<\/td>\n$389.06<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
$1,283.00<\/td>\n$306.24<\/td>\n$527.71<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
$1,453.00<\/td>\n$362.78<\/td>\n$581.67<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
$999.00<\/td>\n$583.09<\/td>\n$66.26<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
$934.00<\/td>\n$0.00<\/td>\n$607.10<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
$796.00<\/td>\n$0.00<\/td>\n$517.40<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
$916.00<\/td>\n$0.00<\/td>\n$595.40<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
s$936.00<\/td>\n$0.00<\/td>\n$608.40<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

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.<\/p>\n

if I look at visits to the steam store page for production line and add that in I get this:<\/p>\n\n\n<\/colgroup>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Sales<\/td>\nMarketing<\/td>\nNet profit<\/td>\nvisits<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
$1,140.00<\/td>\n$351.94<\/td>\n$389.06<\/td>\n357<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
$1,283.00<\/td>\n$306.24<\/td>\n$527.71<\/td>\n295<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
$1,453.00<\/td>\n$362.78<\/td>\n$581.67<\/td>\n342<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
$999.00<\/td>\n$583.09<\/td>\n$66.26<\/td>\n515<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
$934.00<\/td>\n$0.00<\/td>\n$607.10<\/td>\n122<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
$796.00<\/td>\n$0.00<\/td>\n$517.40<\/td>\n86<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
$916.00<\/td>\n$0.00<\/td>\n$595.40<\/td>\n96<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
$936.00<\/td>\n$0.00<\/td>\n$608.40<\/td>\n122<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

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<\/p>\n

So what can be learned?<\/p>\n

a) My suspicion that direct attribution of ads->sales is difficult to correlate certainly seems true.<\/p>\n

b) You can probably double your visits to your steam store page for about $600\/day.<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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<\/p>\n

Continue Reading… More messing with marketing stats<\/span>Continue Reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4666","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4666"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4666\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4668,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4666\/revisions\/4668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}