September 2007 Stats, Or, You Make $1k a Month on WHAT!?

Capsule: I made it past the $1,000 mark in sales, finally.  Net profit was significantly below that due to heavy experimentation with AdWords.  It should hopefully be healthier this month.

Income:

Sales: 41 (1 refund due to customer error, 12 CDs)

Gross Income: $983 + $25 in Canadian + 26 pounds = ~ $1,061

Income Net Paypal: ~$1,039 

Expenses:

GoDaddy: $7

CrazyEgg: $9

e-junkie: $5

SwiftCD: $71

AdCenter: $18

AdWords: $325  (Yowch!)

Total Expenses: $435

Total Profit: $604

Commentary: Yes, as you can see I lost an awful lot of money figuring out what worked and what didn’t with AdWords.  Not all of that is “lost” so much as it is temporarily negative cashflow — there are literally thousands of my trial versions now installed as a result of that expenditure, and some portion of them are going to convert in the future.  I learned a few lessons: #1 you have to watch the content network like a hawk but #2 if you do, especially using their new Conversion Optimizer, it can be amazing.  (I am paying something like 24 cents a free trial now for the last week.  That implies a cost of less than $12 per additional $24 profit sale.  Do a little dance, make a lot of money, get down tonight.)

It seems like it has been a while since I posted updated Analytics stats, so here we go.  Note that the free trials is slightly borked at the moment (it conflicts with Website Optimizer, for some reason — was someone not paying attention to their own product line at Google?):

Visits: 16,000

Trial Downloads: 2,000 + download sites (conversion is about 12.5%, lower than the 20% I was getting last year due to both large numbers of uninterested prospects from the Google search “bingo cards” and also because I am much stricter in counting “conversions” now)

Known Good Trial Installs: 615 (6.5% of them bought, although this is slightly skewed by the fact that the easiest route for buying will automatically flag their trial as a known good install)

Biggest Source of Traffic: The Big G, with 46% of my traffic

Head of the Line or Long Tail?: Long Tail!   Google keywords averaged three hits apiece.  The top 10 keywords counted for only 40% of the total and it falls very, very rapidly from there.

What are the top few?  Same as usual.  Bingo cards, dolch sight word list (#2, first time ever I think), printable bingo cards, bingo card maker, bingo card creator. 

How is the blog doing?  That Free Bingo Card post gets about 1.5k hits a month now, translating into 500 clickthroughs to my site, and about 50 trials or ~ $35 a month in revenue.  ($50 this month, actually.)  Not bad for one single post, and I will finally get off my duff and launch the Bingo Card Creator blog this weekend.

Biggest Vexation?  Google only finds about 60% of my sales, and I remain clueless as to what percentage of AdWords referrals actually go on to buy.  I have a good lower bound for it (which makes my campaign borderline unprofitable) but have no clue what the actual number is — could be double, could be better.  Anecdotally, I definately see the sales numbers go up when I increase AdWords spending, but I’m not sure if the increase is .9x or 1.5x since the data is too darn noisy and limited to boot. 

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