Hey everyone! First of all, I apologize for my absence from this particular forum. The process of starting up Yet Another Business (YAB) while still working full time for the Navy (and spending time with my wife) has kept me too busy to pursue marketing CF, but I think things are starting to settle down enough to the point where I can start doing some marketing things for the MUD now.

To that end, I've been running Google Analytics on our website since June 20th in an attempt to see where our current traffic is coming from, and to establish a "baseline" so we can determine the affect our future online marketing campaign has on driving traffic to our site.

If you're not familiar with Google Analytics, it is a very interesting and powerful tool that lets you do all kinds of analysis on a website. Beyond the standard "number of visits", you can see where folks are visiting from (both from a web and geographic point of view), what pages they are interested in and how long they spend on them, where they go when they leave and how they are finding out about CF.

I thought it would be interesting to post a few of the statistics I've built up on the site since we started collecting the data.

Top Five Sources and % of New Visitors

1. Direct (type the address in and hit go): 3,299 / 23%
2. Dio's: 698 / 19%
3. CF Forums: 456 / 14%
4. Stumbleupon: 339 / 97%
5. Google (organic) (type 'carrion fields' or some such into Google: 298 / 33%

Stumbleupon? 97% new? Interesting source. They checked out 2.23 pages and were on our site for 1:52.

Voting Sites

1. TMS: 99 / 53%
2. Mudconnect: 20 / 85%
3. RPG Gateway: 19 / 89%
4. Mudlists: 9 / 56%
5. Mudmagic: 6 / 83%

That's why I want you to vote on sites other than TMS! We still see traffic from there; more importantly, we still see NEW traffic from those sites.

Top Ten Countries

1. US: 4083 (no surprise there)
2. Canada: 408
3. UK: 194
4. Sweden: 135
5. Russia: 133
6. Australia: 85
7. Denmark: 80
8. Singapore: 71
9. Norway: 56
10. Argentina: 50

We've got almost as many Firefox (2372) users as IE (2801) users. Go Apple...?

1650 absolute unique visitors.

Top Pages: Help/Classes, Search and Help/Races.

Most popular link on the Help Page: Guide to Creating Your First Character. Wow. Think that might need a rewrite.

We've had 5554 visits since June 20th.

Interesting stuff. If anyone wants more data, ask away and I'll post it. More marketing stuff to follow.

Kastellyn the Devourer of Magic, Lord of Legends

*** Email me your testimonials or two-line blurbs. Help our marketing efforts! ***

Carrion Fields Travian

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Carrion+Fields+Travian

FTR. We're getting the word out about CarrionFields, because people around the world are trying to spy on us....(thats my paranoia talking...comes from 15 years of typing where, and one really really bad fight with Istendill that kept me from getting Blooded, but I digress)

Moridin

nt

I agree that the Character Creation Guide might need to be rewritten. No offense to who put it up, but it's a bit hard to read, the font is too small or something. The info is good, but maybe we should respin it to assume that people clicking on it are brand new? If those are completely new people, then they might get put off by the assumption they already know what Carrion Fields is all about.

My two cents.

Great work on the statistics though, very interesting.

Google Analytics also tracks time spent. If you have the pixel set up on multiple pages, you can do analysis on where people are spending their time on the site and what sources lead to longer engagement with the site. There's also a way to hard-code the pixel to fire on a click of the 'play now' and 'connect' buttons as another conversion metric.

Stumbleupon is a pretty fun firefox plugin, it's good if as many as possible add the site there as I believe it comes with some sort of advantage (though I don't know the specifics).

Is there, by any chance, a possibility to correlate these stats against character creations?

(And btw, firefox works on PC's too :))

Guide to creating a new character, and reading helpfiles on class and race... I wonder how many unique visitors are checking that, and then what % converts into a first time log on... would be useful to get a handle on.

That said, I'd put this race/class information on the landing page in some sort of attractive ad copy, then conclude with a link for "guide to building your first character." I'd keep that short, and conclude that with the PLAY NOW option.

Landing page is something I've been talking about from the onset. How goes with the possibility of changing the look/content of our home page?

Right now, it just links from the voting sites, but it's been up there for six months or so. Someone isn't voting...:P

The homepage is still the story page, which I kind of like.

Kastellyn the Devourer of Magic, Lord of Legends

*** Email me your testimonials or two-line blurbs. Help our marketing efforts! ***