Conversion Rate

[Jake]

I am curious what some of your conversion rates are (people who bought the game/people who downloaded it), and Also how many people are downloading it. I mostly want to know if I am doing an OK job promoting GL Golf just with 1 or two updates a month.

Right now GL Golf is getting a registration rate of 0.94% (based on my web stats, IDK if that counts finished downloads or downloads started), and had 7148 downloads last month.

[Najdorf]

wow... I get a conversion rate of 0.25% for RR :-(

And I get about 2300 dwnloads the month when I release a new version, then it declines exponentially.

[Najdorf]

btw, do you feel making a more professional website helped much?

[funkboy]

KTA Tennis received 1863 downloads from January 7 (the first day it was released as 1.0 shareware) to January 9. From January 10 to Jan 12, the game was downloaded 2147 times. So... about 4000 downloads in 6 days. Pretty crazy.

Of course, the game received about 1400 downloads from Dec 30 to January 6 when it was 0.79 - not even available for purchase.

I think the high download numbers are due to it being a sports game, one of the few for the Mac. I actually think my conversion rate would be higher if my new 1.0 release ran better... and I hope I'm not shooting myself in the foot by not having it run smoother. I'm in the process of fixing that problem.

My conversion rate has been about 0.325%, so much more in line with yours, Najdorf. I think the 3D aspect, and probably the easier-to-purchase in-game buying method of GLGolf, makes it more likely to get sales than my tennis game.

[Jake]

btw, do you feel making a more professional website helped much?

I'm not sure really, because of the in game buying probably not, but if I didn't have the in game buying it would have a greater effect.

Good Job with the downloads on Tennis! I had a little bit of time to play it the other day and its looking great!

[radiance]

aquadot!red seems to be getting about a 0.6% conversion rate. I'm probably going to try fiddling with the demo on the next release. Perhaps I'm giving away too much with the demo? Or maybe not enough :) When I get a chance I'm also going to explore more marketing options so that I can increase my download numbers at least; gotta get the word out further than mac download sites!

[funkboy]

As you can tell, 0.6% is a fairly good rate, at least among us few here. I calculated out my rate again, and it seems to be about 0.35% as of today.
I think, unfortunately, the thing to improve purchases would be making my game run smoother. I'm having a heckuva time getting that to happen. :(

[princec]

Ours hover between 0.35% and 1%.

Cas :)

[FCCovett]

Same here with Parasol Wallop! ( Wall-pop, as they call it Germany ;) ), a bit less than 1%, but it was Macworld and all. I guess everyone else was getting an iPod Shuffle this week.

[ActionSoftGuy]

I don't see how you can even try to calculate a "conversion rate" unless your game is distributed _exclusively_ online. What if you got on the InsideMacGames CD? Or some shareware collection CD? Then you have absolutely no idea how many people actually tried the game.

Of course, this means the "conversion rate" could be even lower than you guys are estimating, since you're not taking into account those who got the game, but you don't even know about them, if that's the case.

Although a bit less than 1% sounds right to me. When I was younger, I used to scour the 'net and download all the games I could find, simply because it was fun trying new games. Most of them were junk, and were thrown out right away after the first run. Others, I could play from time to time, but they didn't hook me enough for me to register. Only 1 or 2 shareware games, out of hundreds tried, ever got registered by me. If others are the same way, then a very low conversion rate would be expected, even if your game is pretty good.

-Vern

[funkboy]

Cas, what game do you do?

I need to fix the speed of my game, and then I will have a jump in conversion rate. I'm still hovering around .3% or so.