Thanks for your patience everyone, and welcome to Part 2 of the Queer Halloween Stories Bundle 2023 Postmortem! This post focusing on analytics should be a bit shorter and more organized, so first we'll talk about...

External Traffic & Purchases

Before I move onto the meat of this, I want to make sure I define the difference between the way I'm using the terms traffic and purchases in case you might not be familiar with the marketing funnel:

• Traffic is where people came from to get to our page(s); further action doesn't necessarily occur (they could be checking out the page without purchasing anything or downloading games).
• Purchases were the primary action we hoped to funnel the traffic towards, as sales would lead to revenue for our participants.

One can reasonably expect more traffic than purchases as the former is free to do. This distinction is crucial when it comes to itch.io bundles because unlike individual project pages, bundles will only show analytics for the purchases. This is why a bit.ly short URL can be nice, as they provide a few analytics for referrers and overall traffic. Usage of the bit.ly was encouraged as it was much easier to type in, but ultimately not something that's enforceable. Regardless, nearly half of our traffic that was recorded on the bit.ly analytics came from a category named "Other."

Of the categories listed here, "Other" and "direct" are pretty vague. Do these include clicks from emails/newsletters, Discord, certain Mastodon instances, Cohost, Pillowfort, websites, etc.? Some social media sites that are directly listed include Twitter, Youtube, and tumblr.

Meanwhile, the top 5 external referrals for purchases ended up looking like this (exact numbers have been omitted for the sake of buyer privacy):

Top 5 External Purchase Referrals for the Queer Halloween Stories Bundle 2023

Honorable mentions that didn't make this chart include purchases from Telegram, Tapas, LinkedIn (huh!?), Steam (but I thought Steam didn't allow itch links?!?), iframely (what does this even mean???), and some purchases of the $10 Treat Edition from the SomethingAwful forums. There were also a handful of purchases that came from tumblr, BlueSky, and PayPal itself somehow.  As for gaming publications, three unique websites were listed, including Gayming Magazine whom we reached out to, as well as the GamingOnLinux (a news site dedicated to games that can run natively on Linux OSes) and ENWorld (a news site dedicated to tabletop and other physical games) shown in the referrals above.

Now, you might be asking, "Why didn't Gayming Magazine place higher in that table above?" As I went through the purchase referrals, I noticed that none of them had cited bit.ly as a referral whatsoever. My theory is that purchases originating from bit.ly clicks may have been counted as "Direct Traffic," which could mean Internal Traffic from itch.io's front page coverage itself or something else entirely. In my communications with Gayming Magazine, I asked them to use the bit.ly link as much as possible, so I'm confident that the Silver Package we negotiated was the source of more purchases than what was shown in the bundle purchase information.

Marketing Outreach — Where Is Everyone Now?

It's no secret that Twitter (let's be real, no one is seriously calling it X in a conversation) is a rambling shell of its former self, filled to the brim with bots. Game developers and players are now scattered across the web on different social media sites so it's hard to tell where to focus your efforts on when making a post. Does this site still have real human people on it? Will the algorithm suppress a post with these words? What's the etiquette in this community?

I wish I had an easy answer to all of these questions, but with the way the internet is rapidly changing day by day, there's no longer a "one size fits all" solution to outreach. Specific advice that might be true at the time of posting may no longer hold true a month later. There are however, four pieces of general advice I can safely say will hold the test of time:

• Keep a newsletter: If people have signed up for your newsletter, that's a communication method less likely to be lost to an algorithm. One of the advantages of running a newsletter is that if the service you're using suddenly does something you don't like, you can usually export a .csv of email addresses you can then import to another service; on the flipside, one of the major barriers to establishing a newsletter is that the sender often has to include a physical address, which can be dangerous for people working from home without some sort of office address, PO Box, or Registered Agent they can use to provide an extra layer of security. For participants who didn't have one of these options, using itch.io devlogs as an alternative was viable, but that doesn't provide a list of emails you can take with you from one service to another. 
• Post where you're already active: Parking your name on as many sites as possible isn't a bad idea, but don't try to spread yourself thin juggling every single account if you're handling other development duties. Many social media sites will penalize you if you have a small following and/or you're not constantly posting, so 2 or 3 active accounts is a safe amount I think the majority of people can maintain on their own.
• Always be prepared to jump ship: If the website or service you've settled into has decided to go downhill or otherwise become hostile to the content you make, make sure you backup the most important stuff like your boilerplate text and files before you move onto somewhere new that will hopefully last you a longer time. It has happened before, and it will happen again.
• Have your own static website: One of the safest options is owning a website that's only at the whims of the host and domain name system you're purchasing from. Customer support will vary so definitely do your research on who you use before you commit, but after you're settled in, it's largely stable for the most part and you can link to it from any of your social media accounts. As always, do backups of your website in case things go downhill.

It can be difficult to keep public-facing updates on a regular basis, but when it accounts for at least 40% of traffic, it's important to keep at it.

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That's all we have for today! Stay tuned for Part 3, where we'll hopefully be able to wrap things up with advice for others running their own bundles as well as some long-form discussion on sustainability, individual game sales, and more!