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* The Business of Software

I've got a product that has been doing pretty well, but sales have flattened out.  Take a look at this graph of site visitors vs downloads vs uninstalls vs potential purchasers (those that clicked the order button--don't have a chart of exactly how many actually purchased)

http://img283.imageshack.us/img283/9429/analysisxg7.png

I'm doing about as well as I can on the search engines.  What do I need to do to get some growth going?

What else have you done to market this product? You still have a long way to go. In other words you have only started. The sample you give is less than a year. It may take *years* to grow your product into something big. Also, all of the graphs look exactly right to me - at least their relationship.

Well, the graph is 18 months, and I've actually had the website up for 5 years or so, although really pushing it for only the last 18 months or so, so there was a long tiny tail out the left side of the graph.

I guess I'm wondering about the flattening out that I've experienced.  Advertising is definitely a sore point--mostly just AdWords right now.  I'm getting a professional website update and hoping that helps download conversions.

Anyone else see anything significant in the graphs?

Off Topic: This is a good example of why I think most 3D charts suck. It would be much easier to read the values with a plain old fashioned line chart.

On-Topic: Step 1 of the analysis indicates you need more traffic (targetted, of course). I have found that writing articles on topics related to my product has generated a lot of traffic plus helped with SEO, thereby perpetuating it further.

blog.

Blogging/article writing helps.  I pay $20 a week for 25% of my traffic.  Another 25% (and, ultimately, one sale out of six or so) comes from search engine hits and direct links to a single useful resource I made which is interesting for my market.  As opposed to actual advertising, that took a lot less time to work on (probably an hour -- darn HTML tables -- as opposed to LOTS of hours working on AdWords) and will never bill my credit card again.

Note on blogging: its helpful to blog for the audience of your software.  Silly point to mention but somebody should say it ;)  My blog is more for developers than for teachers, so the only thing it contributes in business terms is some PR juice... although one teacher did find me through it and go on to purchase.

I noticed from your charts that the slowdown was over the summer... might it just be a seasonal slowdown?

BTW I am yet to be convinced that blogging helps - but I guess it depends on you market.

There's a lot more going on here than the graphs can show.

The graphs themselves aren't great either.  (Maybe extracted ratio's time smoothed would be clearer.)

If you hire somebody, give them full details and they spend time you could get a valuable analysis.

Alternatively, try to put yourself in the mind of your target audience, work through their thought process and see what that throws up.  (There are a lot of annoyances that can turn people off and the majority of web sites commit several of these "crimes".)

It appears to me that the number of uninstalls that are occurring are an extremely high percentage of the total downloads.  I'd work on why there are so many uninstalls, since that has an inverse correlation to the number sold AND will ultimately ruin your sales completely through negative word-of-mouth.

One option is to have the uninstall process bring them to a page which gives them a few options for why they uninstalled and provides a text area for those who care enough to give details.  Your goal is to make this page as unannoying as possible since people might already be annoyed that you brought them here. 

The goal is to find those people out there who do like to help.. and who may provide some insight into what it is that is missing or wrong with your product.

Where are you getting the majority of your downloads?  If it's from adwords (or something similiar), could you be targeting the wrong audience?  For example, maybe they are looking for a tool to organize their photos and then they download your software and discover that it is best used to edit photos.