Download To Sales Ratio

[dxgame]

Sorry if this has been dsicussed before, I just wanted to see what everyone's typical download to sales ratio is and what qualifies as great, good, bad, forget about it, etc.

When I was doing screensavers, we averaged around 1 sale for every 200 downloads. Some screensavers would do a little better, some a little worse. What's typical (good and bad) for PC games? Thanks.

[DFG]

Great - 2%
Bad - .3%
Typical for the industry for all titles (my non-scientific guess) .8%

Really depends on traffic sources like how much foreign traffic, kids traffic, how long a title has been out, ease of ordering, trust, and many other factors.

[mash]

<0.5% - "not so good"
~1% - good
>1.5% - very, very good

[ggambett]

This is called "conversion rate", by the way. Search for that, we've talked about CR extensively.

[Coyote]

Now here is a trick...

When your game gets mirrored across bazillions of file-sharing sites, how do you measure conversion rate?

[James C. Smith]

You embed a unique ID in each file that is downloaded from the servers you control. This won't help you track the conversion ration on all the mirrored copies, but at least it allows you to ignore all the sales they generate and calculate an accurate CR on the sales generated by downloads from your servers. In other words, as soon as there are multiple sales from the same download ID you ignore all sales from that ID.

Of course this requires that you have a way to embed an ID in each download (something that has been discussed here before) and it requires a purchasing system that can pass that ID back with each order (for example, make it a query parameter of the order form URL).

[soniCron]

Previous discussion about embedding unique ID's in downloads:

http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthread.php?t=3825

[2dnoob]

uh..excuse my ignorance but....

Great - 2%

Does this come out to :

.5% = 1/2 sale for every 100 downloads
1% = 1 sale for every 100 downloads
2% = 2 sales for every 100 downloads

?

[mash]

Yep!

Bye!
Mash

[Coyote]

2% conversion means 2 sales per 100 downloads.

Note too that conversion rate may vary by audience. You may have a game that walks on water on one site with a 'preferred' audience, but sell terribly on some other portal. Like all other stats, it's a good indicator, but it isn't the be-all, end-all.

[Artinum]

"Percent" is indeed "per cent" (literally "per hundred").

So two percent is two in every hundred.

[KNau]

I wonder, how do those with browser-based demos calculate their conversion rates or do they even bother.

The tries-to-sales ratio must be overwhelming when you're talking about free trial Flash games.