How much traffic did Humble Bundle send us?

Posted by Patrick on 11 Aug 2011 | 2 Comments

Almost two weeks ago, one of our startups, Compilr.com, became a top contributor on Humble Bundle.   Our goal was to get in front of indie game developers with our recent XNA release.  Let’s take a deeper look and see if we got the exposure we wanted.

During Humble Bundle, we saw our traffic increase 84.79% and our number of page views increase 51.11%.  A huge increase in traffic, however there were a lot of people just exploring.  Our bounce rate and average time on website dropped significantly.

We averaged about 50-80 additional signups per day, resulting in about 840 new accounts directly from this campaign.   In total we ended up paying about $593.21 to stay ranked as a top contributor.  We felt we would get the same exposure whether we were ranked number 1 or 10.  It would be interesting to compare our data with MtGox.com who paid $4,096 to get first position.

If you work out the math we ended up paying:

• $0.71 per user acquisition
• $0.13 per visit

All-in-all it ended up being a great investment and some of it even went to charity.

This should be testament to always be on the lookout for alternative advertising.

Your Analytics is missing tons of data!

Posted by Patrick on 9 Aug 2011 | No Comments Yet

With the proliferation of new devices like smartphones and tablets, you’re probably losing a lot of useful data.  The worse part of it is you probably don’t even realize it.

Here’s the scenario.  Let’s say John finds your website by clicking on a pay-per-click ad for the keyword “mp3 player”.  He finds the mp3 player he’s looking for on your website, but the price is a little steep so he’s going to have to check in with the wife before such a large purchase.  He abandons your shopping cart.

Later that evening he gets the OK from the wife and decides to make the purchase.  Except he throws your analytics a curveball… He goes back to your website from his iPad and makes the order.

From the scenario above, you have several problems with your analytics.  John now appears as two different visitors in your analytics, one that completed a conversion and one that didn’t.  The worse part is the conversion wasn’t completed in the funnel you paid advertising dollars for.

The original way John found your website was clicking on the ad for mp3 players, which cost you money and lead to no conversions.  This can lead you believe your advertising campaign is losing money and ultimately cause you to turn off the ad.

You may think this doesn’t apply to you, because it may be an unlikely scenario.  Here is a really likely scenario because so many users have email setup right on their smartphones.  A user comes to your website from their PC then signs up to your newsletter.  A week later you send out a new email newsletter, the user opens it from their smartphone, makes a purchase.  Once again you can’t track the original way the user came to your website.

It’s imperative that you try to come up with a solution to replicate critical session data from one device to another to increase the amount of good accurate data in your analytics.  If not it will affect how you are tracking your ad performance and even any split tests that may be running.

Rankings Drop: When Google Split-Tests Their Search Results.

Posted by Nick on 3 Aug 2011 | 2 Comments

Earlier this week the Ninja Otter team just about went into shock when we logged into our SEOMOZ dashboard and viewed the search engine rankings for one of our projects. Although the application had enjoyed top three rankings in Google for a number of years, for some unknown reason it seemed that we had now dropped to the bottom of the first page. A few quick searches in Google confirmed that this was not just a problem with SEOMOZ, and that our rankings had in fact taken a drastic decline. And of course, our sales took a huge hit as a result.

As per our SEOMOZ dashboard, our organic traffic declined by about 40% on the keywords we were targeting. We went into panic-mode trying to figure out as quickly as possible what had went wrong.

Although you can never be 100% sure what causes a change in your rankings, we’re fairly certain that this particular drop in our rankings was the result of A/B testing carried out by Google. Why do we think this? Because without us having made any changes whatsoever to our website or SEO efforts our rankings were restored the very next day. As startups we have heard countless experts praise the benefits of A/B testing, but many start-ups fail to realize that their own SEO efforts can become the subject of A/B testing, and that this is not a reason to panic. Google often changes the order of their rankings to see which sites get higher click-through-rates in different positions (it is assumed that a higher click-through-rate means the site was of relatively more interest to the searcher).

If this happens to you, remain calm. If you have a quality site and make a point of avoiding black-hat SEO tactics your rankings will likely be restored. When your Google rankings take a sudden and drastic drop, it’s not worth pulling out your hair just yet. Of course you should look into what may have caused the drop, but if you haven’t committed SEO suicide then you should be able to come out on the winning side of the A/B test. If you’re lucky you’re rankings will be restored through no action of your own. If you’re not so lucky then it’s time to start examining why your competition got a higher click-through-rate than you during Google’s test.

Why are we a top contributor on Humble Bundle?

Posted by Patrick on 28 Jul 2011 | No Comments Yet

If you haven’t heard, Humble Bundle is back. You can buy several indie games, donate to charities and pay whatever you wish. Our team decided to make a purchase, enough to become a top contributor. But why would we shell out $543.21 just to become a top contributor?

1. We love supporting great ideas and those who execute them. Humble Bundle is a novel idea. It supports charities and indie game developers. Lots of indie game developers have limited distribution channels, so this adds to their arsenal and adds to their revenue stream.
2. They support charities like EFF and Child’s Play. Both great organizations. The great aspect of Humble Bundle is you can choose exactly how much money you want to go to these charities. It is very transparent. This reassures us that our money is (hopefully) going to the charities, especially when there has been speculation of other companies taking advantage of donations.
3. Games are awesome and indie game developers are awesome-er. Back when I was 14 I had my first indie game published and it was a thrill. My roots are in indie game development. Our team is really excited in exploring this space again.
4. We love trying new marketing strategies. While other contributors are promoting their Twitter accounts, we are actually promoting one of our startups, Compilr. One of our largest market segments is indie game developers and we just launched XNA for C# and VB. It just made sense to us. We will definitely share some numbers from the traffic we receive and break it down once we have enough data.