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Sales of Bingo Card Creator Per Month

bingocardcreator.com

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Re: Sales of Bingo Card Creator Per Month

#11

Post by paraschopra »

patio11 wrote: post #9
paraschopra wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was just browsing it and since it had so much juice, I thought HN might be interested :) By the way, people, do check out other pages in the sidebar. The link showing expenses is especially interesting. @patio11: don't you have conversion stats on this page? I see it has free sign ups and total revenue, month-wise. But having month-wise conversion stats (across the funnel) will be interesting.

Consolidated conversion rate is a poor metric because it doesn't help me make decisions. If it goes up, is that because of something I did on-page, or is that because of something that one of my competitors did, or is that because of market seasonality, or is it because of a change in the Google algorithms which sent a different mix of people to me? I don't know, so looking at it tells me nothing. See also: consolida…

Well, I think if your conversion rate is going down or up, something has changed and you must investigate what has changed. Agreed that conversion rate, by itself, doesn't yield much information but compared to past or across segments, it can yield a lot of insights.

Re: Sales of Bingo Card Creator Per Month

#13

Post by patio11 »

iaskwhy wrote: post #8

You seem to be reducing the amount of money going for advertising. Any special reason for this? Thanks for the awesomeness of sharing all this stuff!

That is the opposite of the truth, actually.

I just haven't done bookkeeping for 2010 yet, because a plugin I used on my bookkeeping page broke back in February, and I've been putting off fixing it.

My actual advertising budget is largely a factor of two things: Google AdWords algorithms and Google AdWords customer support. One of these two things I have a lot of love for, because it automatically matches my ads up with sites they perform well on, and I'd happily spend $100k if they'd let me. The other I have had some issues with, most recently that it frequently takes weeks or months for them to approve changes or additions to my ads, which does not help minimize the time through the learning loop at all.

I get really, really tired of having to argue /dev/null that I am not a gambling operation.

Re: Sales of Bingo Card Creator Per Month

#15

Post by patio11 »

paraschopra wrote: post #11
patio11 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consolidated conversion rate is a poor metric because it doesn't help me make decisions. If it goes up, is that because of something I did on-page, or is that because of something that one of my competitors did, or is that because of market seasonality, or is it because of a change in the Google algorithms which sent a different mix of people to me? I don't know, so looking at it tells me nothing. See also: consolida…

Well, I think if your conversion rate is going down or up, something has changed and you must investigate what has changed. Agreed that conversion rate, by itself, doesn't yield much information but compared to past or across segments, it can yield a lot of insights.

Well, I think if your conversion rate is going down or up, something has changed and you must investigate what has changed.

I disagree, strongly.

1) It is highly likely your conversion rate will bounce around without regard to what you're doing.

http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/conversio...

Just eyeballing that, can you pick the most critical time for me to have checked conversion rates in the last year? (It might -- and I stress might -- have saved me $3.5k.)

2) I think humans are exceptionally good at retrofitting explanations to data, even when the explanation and the data are unrelated.

3) Rather than continually reacting to minor changes in the conversion rate, deceiving myself as to their cause, and then implementing something that probably doesn't matter, I'd rather schedule this sort of work as part of a process: write A/B test, check conversions (with all extraneous sources of noise filtered out), implement winning alternative as appropriate, get back to work.

Re: Sales of Bingo Card Creator Per Month

#18

Post by count »

patio11 wrote: post #6
jgrahamc wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really understand what one does with a Bingo Card created by this software. Is this an American teaching method that's common?

Let's say you're doing, I don't know, a lesson on cellular biology. After wrapping it up, on Friday afternoon, you want to play a fun game which still has some educational content. So you print out one Parts of A Cell bingo card for each student in your class and explain how bingo works (or not, because they've almost certainly played before). Then start calling things like "This center of the cell is where the chrom…

This man KNOWS his educational bingo! :) Being married to a teacher, I can concur from experience.

Re: Sales of Bingo Card Creator Per Month

#19

Post by 10ren »

patio11 wrote: post #6
jgrahamc wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really understand what one does with a Bingo Card created by this software. Is this an American teaching method that's common?

Let's say you're doing, I don't know, a lesson on cellular biology. After wrapping it up, on Friday afternoon, you want to play a fun game which still has some educational content. So you print out one Parts of A Cell bingo card for each student in your class and explain how bingo works (or not, because they've almost certainly played before). Then start calling things like "This center of the cell is where the chrom…

I've know about your Bingo Card Creator for about a year now, and for the first time I know what it is. Clearly an explanation is not necessary for your market (which I assume is the US); to expand internationally, evangelizing for the teaching method itself would reap great rewards, I believe. As a vague demonstration, Avatar has earnt 27.5% domestic, 72.5% international: http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=avatar.htm

[I'm in Australia, a close relative was a secondary school teacher, and I've never heard of it. But sounds like a great idea, and you have a great pitch for selling it]

very minor nit: nice to distinguish in some way the final month (May) in the chart as incomplete (or not show it).

Re: Sales of Bingo Card Creator Per Month

#20

Post by philjr »

10ren wrote: post #19
patio11 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say you're doing, I don't know, a lesson on cellular biology. After wrapping it up, on Friday afternoon, you want to play a fun game which still has some educational content. So you print out one Parts of A Cell bingo card for each student in your class and explain how bingo works (or not, because they've almost certainly played before). Then start calling things like "This center of the cell is where the chrom…

I've know about your Bingo Card Creator for about a year now, and for the first time I know what it is. Clearly an explanation is not necessary for your market (which I assume is the US); to expand internationally, evangelizing for the teaching method itself would reap great rewards, I believe. As a vague demonstration, Avatar has earnt 27.5% domestic, 72.5% international: http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=avatar.h…

I'd concur strongly with this. I have a few teacher friends who I've mentioned this to who have been interested in the concept and have never heard of it previously.
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