Marketing Experiments
So I’ve got an adventure out that isn’t selling at all. While Ishau and Heist are happily chugging along week after week, my newest module, The Heart of Goodhollow, sold a grand total of 1 copy in 14 days. What gives?
The text
The Heart of Goodhollow
No one knows what happened to the once peaceful village of Goodhollow. Its green fields have been transformed into a festering swamp where giant spiders and frog-men battle for supremacy. And in the center of it all an ancient evil’s heart still beats.
An adventure for characters between levels 5-7
This 16-page adventure presents a new location for you to drop into your campaign of Dungeons and Dragons – the swamps of Goodhollow. Players explore the swamp through a mini hex-crawl, making their way past the ettercap-infested village of Goodhollow, the bullywug palace of king Gorak Accaroak and the hidden home of the night hag Wilthulia, who makes her lair inside the husk of a petrified ancient kraken.
History
This adventure originally appeared as a single page adventure in the Lonely Scroll bundle and has been greatly expanded with new monsters, maps, and items.
What’s going on here?
So what’s the problem? I’ve got some hypotheses:
1. No unique selling point
I mean, it’s well made (if I do say so myself), but the contents are fairly generic. There’s a swamp, it’s got a witch, some bullywugs, an ettercap village… Kinda run of the mill stuff. So it doesn’t stand out, and there’s definitely no “Search Engine Optimization” going on.
If you search for “swamp”, it’s at the bottom of the fourth page. If you search for “bullywug”, it’s on the first page but way on the bottom. “Hag”: below The Sunken Ruins of Ishau even. At least for “ettercap” it’s pretty high up. But how many people are out there looking for ettercap-based adventures?
Compare that to searching for “Ishau” – an explicit location in a hardcover. You look for that, you’re going to get exactly one result: mine*! And for “cassalanter” my adventure is the first result on the page*!
*That’s actually kind of crazy!
2. Bad level-range
I’m pretty sure 90% of searches-by-level are for 1st level adventures (and the other 10% is level 2-3). Once players reach 5+, the DM has their own stuff going on, or is using a published adventure.
3. Art
This one’s about conversion – the other problems prevent people from finding the adventure, but this could be a reason they don’t buy it when they do. I personally like the b/w style that I’ve got going on with my adventures, but they definitely don’t pop like the full-page color spreads do. And somehow the title gets pretty blurry too on DMsGuild. So would better art cause more people to click through their search results?
4. Price
Same as above – would a lower (or higher?) price change anything in the conversion rate?
5. Text
Finally, there’s the text on the landing. It’s got art that’s admittedly a bit amateur (I think it’s got a really cool Munch-vibe though). It doesn’t have a call to action (BUY THIS NOW!). And finally, it actively sends you to a “competing” product that’s only 1$ more expensive. I mean, you can get this adventure and 19 others for only a dollar more!
Experimentation ahead!
So let’s go all science on this thing and test the hypotheses! On a gut level, I feel that three weeks per experiment is a fair time, but I am way too impatient for that – so I’ll tweak this thing on a biweekly basis. Let’s see if we can get it to sell a bit more 🙂
Date (2 week intervals) | Experiment | Views | Sales |
|---|---|---|---|
22 Sep – 5 Oct | Initial version | Unknown | 1 |
6 Oct – 19 Oct | Remove link to the competition | Unknown | 0 |
20 Oct – 2 Nov | Add View Tracking | ? | ? |
3 Nov – 16 Nov | Hook into Saltmarsh | ? | ? |
I dunno if the external stuff like holidays is going to have any effects, but we can always correlate those with my other adventures.
Let the games begin!
22 Sep – 5 Oct: Initial version
This is the initial version as posted above, with that sweet ribbon position! And still it just sold 1 copy. Sad!
6 Oct – 19 Oct: Remove link to competition
It’d be too good to be true – a silly little link to the Lonely Scroll competition bundle would be the reason this wasn’t selling at all? Of course not. I removed it and nothing changed.
20 Oct – 2 Nov: View tracking
So I’ve just figured out that while DMsGuild doesn’t share any analytics data, you can DIY it by using Imgur as a hosting website for your images. If someone visits the page for Heart of Goodhollow they get served an image, and Imgur increases its view count, which I can see. There’s no information about timing, region, etc. but it’s better than nothing and should allow me to see if people even find my adventure in the pile!
As such I’m going to extend the previous experiment by two weeks so that I can get some baseline view metrics.
As an initial impression: last night Ishau’s landing page was opened 30 times, Heist 60, and Goodhollow… big fat zero. We may be on to something.
For the next experiment, I’m going to try something very simple: what if I flag this adventure as being part of the Ghosts of Saltmarsh setting?