Overlooked factor in PDF Sales

[meatpopsicl3]

One of the things I've noticed at 3ednd.com is that PDF sales are (more than any other factor) effected by traffic to your homepage. Whenever I make a news announcement on my homepage, traffic goes up and sales go up in direct proportion for a week after that announcement. I've been tracking this closely for 6 weeks now, and the coorelation is remarkable.

For d20 Publishers out there that are looking at sales figures of other companies like E.N. Publishing and dreaming of getting sales in the hundreds or thousands, I would suggest a slightly different "measuring stick" (see below) as a basis of comparision.

Let's take the publication, "The Elements of Magic" for example. This is neither limited by the "adventure limit" or the "DM limit" that other people have posted about. This seems like a product that would have a very wide appeal to gamers, has a publisher with a good reputation, and is offered at a fair price for its size (was $6.95 before the $1.00 sale).

OK, Elements of Monsters went on-sale on RPGNow on November 25, 2002. On March 22, 2003 Morrus reported that they had 822 sales "a couple weeks ago" (we'll use March 07 as the date).

During this time, Elements of Monsters was being advertised on E.N. World's main page, and so was being seen 2,000,000 times per month (E.N. World was getting about 2 million views per month of its main page alone during this time).

Doing the math, that comes out to 3.75 months (7,500,000 page views) and 822 sales, which would be 1 sale per 9,124 page views which equals a "conversion ratio" of 0.0001.

In the world of Direct Marketing, a conversion ration of 1% or 2% is considered respectable (that's 0.01 or 0.02). This just goes to show you how far we have to go as PDF publishers! I'd say if you are getting anything over a 0.001 conversion ratio selling PDF publications, you are doing fantastic !

What I'm trying to say here is that if you only sell 20 or 30 copies of a publication and are wondering why you aren't selling 800 or 1000 copies, remember that you probably aren't getting anywhere NEAR the amount of traffic as mega-sites like E.N. World or RPGPlanet. This might be the Internet equivalent of Location, Location, Location!

In fact, I think it would be an interesting experiment to put a publication on the E.N. World homepage like "The Elements of Monsters" (sold by 3ednd.com) and see how it does (oh please, oh please, oh please!) -- well, I can dream, can't I ?

Another way to looks at it would be to compare your number of Demo Downloads to actual purchases, and you should always have a link in your demo that allows people to give you imediate feedback (like a link to a forum). First question in the forum (make it a sticky with a poll) would be "Would you buy this product? Why or why not?" -- you'd be amazed at how frank people will be.

If people spent the time to download and actually read your product when it was free and you're not seeing at least a 2 - 3 % conversion ratio, you might simply be doing something seriously wrong -- and if you ask, you guests will tell you what it is. Fix it, and let them know you fixed it.

Just some ramblings, hope people found this helpful

-Darrel Cusey
3ednd.com Publishing, LLC
http://www.3ednd.com

 

[d20Dwarf]

This is, of course, only one of the key factors.

Given this correlation, I'd like to hear from some of the advertisers on EN World to get an idea of the effectiveness of the ads. Currently I see only 5 or so ads in the rotation, but there are as you know a TON of pdf publishers putting out product. So is EN World not an effective advertising tool? If it is, perhaps publishers simply don't know that or don't know how effective it is.

Is the click-through rate tracked on EN World banner ads? How about sales data?

 

[jmucchiello]

I've never bought a banner ad on ENWorld because until this week, I thought the cost was too high. When I have something new to sell, I will consider using ENWorld. Other publishers have in the past indicated mixed results from using ENWorld banner ads. But what would I know?

Is the click-through rate tracked on EN World banner ads? How about sales data?

I would find this information informing as well.

 

[Monte At Home]

I suspect that website traffic is indeed vitally important, but I don't know if it's the cause or the effect. Our site has really good traffic. When a product goes on sale, we direct that traffic both to our own sales site and to RPGNow. The initial sales surge is thus split about 50/50. Over the long haul, sales are directed to our own sales site with the assumption that the benefit we get from RPGNow is that it draws its own traffic. This means that in the long term, products still sell consistently through our site and sales from RPGNow taper off (but are still good enough for us to keep selling there). We also sell pdfs through other vendors, but we don't direct any of our traffic there. Sales at those other vendors are very small.

The question is, do people buy our products because they're at the site, or do they come to the site because they want the products? Or, do people come to our site and buy our products for the same reason--that I've managed to fool people into thinking that I write halfway decent stuff.

I'm not sure. I operate, however, assuming that as long as I keep up a cool website, it helps sales (the fact that writing stuff for my site is a lot of fun is a nice side benefit--I'd do it even if I wasn't selling anything).

 

[Morrus]

I've never bought a banner ad on ENWorld because until this week, I thought the cost was too high. When I have something new to sell, I will consider using ENWorld. Other publishers have in the past indicated mixed results from using ENWorld banner ads. But what would I know?
I would find this information informing as well.

People do get very, very mixed results. Some banners do well, others get ignored by everyone.

All EN World does is guarantee the banner will be seen by people. I fulfill that guarantee, but I can't make people click on it. Getting people to click on your banner is your (the publisher, not you specifically) job.

It's odd that people categorise some places as "good" to advertise at and some not so. There's no substantive difference between the people who see your ad here and those who see it at, say, RPGHost or RPGNet, or even Google.com (other than differences of interests, but, again targeting the ad is the advertiser's job). All places do the same thing, and that's merely to display your ad, and it can't be denied that here at EN World your ad is going to be seen by an awful lot of people. But if your ad sucks, no one will click on it. They won't click on it at EN World, and they won't click on it anywhere else, either.

Click through rate is available to each advertiser, and it varies from almost nothing to (the best I've seen) 2%. I've also seen some interesting strategies from people who have put some thought into their advertising which really paid off (for example, instead of using 1M impressions, have 4 separate ads simultaneously running at 250K impressions - that has worked very well for at least one publisher: 4 ad slots means the ads are appearing at 4 times the normal rate, and the ads vary frequently, preventing people from getting "immunised" to them).

The final thing to consider is this: someone who sees an ad and doesn't click on it is not a failed piece of advertising from the advertiser's POV. If you're driving along the road and you spot a billboard for a new cellphone, has the advertiser failed if you don't immediately stop your car and phone up the cellphone company? Or does the advertiser succeed a few months down the line when you go to upgrade your cellphone and you end up buying the one you've seen ad ad for about 4,000 times?

 

[d20Dwarf]

People do get very, very mixed results. Some banners do well, others get ignored by everyone.

All EN World does is guarantee the banner will be seen by people. I fulfill that guarantee, but I can't make people click on it. Getting people to click on your banner is your (the publisher, not you specifically) job.

It's odd that people categorise some places as "good" to advertise at and some not so. There's no substantive difference between the people who see your ad here and those who see it at, say, RPGHost or RPGNet, or even Google.com (other than differences of interests, but, again targeting the ad is the advertiser's job). All places do the same thing, and that's merely to display your ad, and it can't be denied that here at EN World your ad is going to be seen by an awful lot of people. But if your ad sucks, no one will click on it. They won't click on it at EN World, and they won't click on it anywhere else, either.

No need to be defensive. But the most important question was left unanswered: Do you track click-through rates, and what information is available to potential ad buyers as well as those who have purchased them?

 

[Bloodstone Press]

Just a few quick thoughts

In fact, I think it would be an interesting experiment to put a publication on the E.N. World homepage like "The Elements of Monsters" (sold by 3ednd.com) and see how it does (oh please, oh please, oh please!) -- well, I can dream, can't I ?

You can sort of do this already by buying ad space on EN world. I understand its not the same as Morrus putting a pic and a link on the front page, like he does with his own products, but you should also consider the psychological factors involved with putting his product on his page. In part, it helps his sales because people recognize the publisher's name and usually trust it.

If he put one of your (or one of my) books on the front page in a similar way, we wouldn't see the same sort of sales, because some people would be dubious about the quality and content.

On one hand, it might not be a bad idea for Morrus to sell ad space like that. But, in a way he does that already with the banners. And, spotlighting books from other companies might diminish the perception of his own products when he puts them on the front page.

Doing the math, that comes out to 3.75 months (7,500,000 page views) and 822 sales, which would be 1 sale per 9,124 page views which equals a "conversion ratio" of 0.0001.

Yeah. But remember that not everyone who sees your home page is in the "buy" mindset. Some are just surfing around, or even spying on competitors. I think a better way to figure conversion rate is to look at your product page views in the vendor section of RPGnow. I think it is a safe assumption that no one is going to view a product page unless they are a potential customer, either right then, or sometime in the future.

Using that number, my conversion rates are sometimes as high as 12%, but usually taper off to about 2-5%. I suspect that is about average. Monte and Morrus probably have much higher initial conversion rates. A strong marketing push before a release is the best way to get the initial conversion rate up, I think.

About Advertising on EN World:

If you buy ad space on EN world, (as I have once or twice) you get a link to a tracking where you can see the click through rate. However, both times I bought space, the link didn't work, so I never actually saw the click through rates.

I didn't buy more advertising because I felt the cost was too high. But now that he's reduced the price, I'll be buying banners on a monthly basis.

However, banner click through rates across the net have been falling for a long time. A couple years ago, I remember hearing a lot news about how the average click through rate across the Internet had fallen below 2%.

[Irrelevant banner ad rant]
I don't think people should use Banners with the idea that people will click on them. Less than 2% will (unless that number had changed recently). Instead, use banners as billboards. Make sure all the info you want the customer to see is on the banner. Don't say, "its Great! Click Here!" because no one will. Instead, use banners for branding, rather than sales portals.
[/ irrelevant banner ad rant]

One of the things I've always found VERY amusing about marketing is the way the numbers work. Marketers will tell you, "OK, research shows that the average person visits a site 7 times before they buy something. So, you just need to do things that keeps people coming back to your site at least 7 times, and they'll buy!"

That sort of logic is ridiculous to me, but I can't deny that it seems to work. I don't like it because it theoretically takes the "free will" out of the buying processes. But again, I can't deny the fact that the more times people see a title, the more likely they are to buy it.

 

[Morrus]

[Irrelevant banner ad rant]
I don't think people should use Banners with the idea that people will click on them. Less than 2% will (unless that number had changed recently). Instead, use banners as billboards. Make sure all the info you want the customer to see is on the banner. Don't say, "its Great! Click Here!" because no one will. Instead, use banners for branding, rather than sales portals.
[/ irrelevant banner ad rant]

I couldn't have said it better myself! Anyone who buys banners with the sole purpose of generating click-thrus is misunderstanding the correct application of that particular tool, and is bound to be disappointed.

 

[d20Dwarf]

About Advertising on EN World:

If you buy ad space on EN world, (as I have once or twice) you get a link to a tracking where you can see the click through rate. However, both times I bought space, the link didn't work, so I never actually saw the click through rates.

One would think this a disincentive to rebuy advertising. Did you report the errors?

However, banner click through rates across the net have been falling for a long time. A couple years ago, I remember hearing a lot news about how the average click through rate across the Internet had fallen below 2%.

[Irrelevant banner ad rant]
I don't think people should use Banners with the idea that people will click on them. Less than 2% will (unless that number had changed recently). Instead, use banners as billboards. Make sure all the info you want the customer to see is on the banner. Don't say, "its Great! Click Here!" because no one will. Instead, use banners for branding, rather than sales portals.
[/ irrelevant banner ad rant]

If 2% is average then certainly you should expect more from a target-rich environment like EN World, where virtually 100% of visitors could use your product and use products like it on a regular basis.

If Morrus was interested in selling the maximum amount of advertising, then he should probably find out what the overall click-through rate is for ads on the site. If they are low, or even average I would argue, then there is probably something wrong with how the ads are placed on the page (although specific ad click-through rates may suffer from poor graphic design, the overall total would be informative of a site-specific issue).

For instance, I think that big list of ads and links at the top is a huge detriment to banner ads, that are forced higher up on the page and farther from the actual content. Much like the Sticky forum threads get subconsciously glossed over because they are always there, I would bet that click-through rates would increase by placing the ads closer to the site's content.

I'm not picking on Morrus, just using him as a convenient example since we all (theoretically) have interest in his site as an advertising tool.

 

[Morrus]

I'm not picking on Morrus, just using him as a convenient example since we all (theoretically) have interest in his site as an advertising tool.

Well, I'd certainly be interested in hearing if anyone has any (practical) ideas re. advertising here. I've often tried to think of something to supplement traditional banner ads, for example, but I don't want to do anything which would distract from the site's basic functionality. Making things too intrusive just annoys people.

It's in the advertisers' interests for advertising here to be as effectiove as possible for obvious reasons; and it's in my interests because I want to sell the darn things!