Inside the Mind of a Board Gamer
I thought I’d share with you some of the information and trends that I’m already starting to see with this preview site to give you an interesting look at some of our potential gaming community.
One of the reasons for me releasing this preview site was to spread the word and get people looking forward to something that they can use to feed their board games addiction.
So far the site is working better than planned - I did a little initial marketing to spread the word hoping to get people reading and wanting to know more. Other than this initial buzz, I’ve since dived back into development-related tasks rather than promotional.
I hoped that the site content and information would give search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN something to crunch through and hopefully bring a few people organically to the site (rather than paid-for or time-consuming manual advertising).
A Wealth of Information
It really is amazing what sort of information that search engines make available to you nowadays - Google especially since it’s all for free!
As well as watching people sign up to be kept in touch, I’ve also been watching Google slowly crawling the site (and you can see exactly when it does that too - Google last crawled this site on March 17th and last downloaded the sitemap 21 hours ago!)
The site analytics show the amount of traffic coming from direct sources and referral sources, plus search engines traffic over time.
What’s more interesting is that engines like Google actually provide access to the search phrases and keywords that people type into the search engines that lead them to the site - this gives a great snapshot of what current board gamers are looking for online (that lead them here anyway!)
Whilst the site isn’t getting huge traffic yet (So, Facebook and MySpace you can stop worrying now 
) people do end up here from many different starting points - still all board gamers though so a great target for the site’s eventual users.
Searching for Board Games
So what are current board gamers searching for online? Here’s how some of them have ended up at FastMovingGames during the last month:
This is just one of the many reports that Google lets me look at - from this one I can tell that about 40% of all traffic to the site is currently from search engines - not bad considering I’ve stopped doing any other real promotion for now!
People are reading on average about 2-3 pages per visit when they’re coming from search engines - again, probably checking out if the site has anything to do with their real search intent. The bounce percentage tells me that at least 30% of these people are still interested enough to not immediately go somewhere else.
Cross-referencing this with the number of people that actually sign-up to be kept in touch, it looks like the site is an interesting enough side-effect of non-direct searches that they want to know more - great stuff!
The website analytics really are a great mine of information - look at a few of the Google search phrases that have lead people here for the board game Agricola for example:
- play agricola online
- agricola board game
- agricola board game online play
- agricola game
- agricola how to play
- agricola+board
Not only does this give me an indication of the different types of search strategies people are using to find the site, it also tells me that there’s scope for someone out there with some technical skill (a particular gaming buddy of mine for example who has been thinking about getting an interactive online game out for years now but hasn’t had the time!) to get an online version of this game out there now whilst it’s still hot property!
Where on Earth are you Board Gamers?
The other neat thing that Google tells me is where site visitors are based in the world. What’s novel here is that Google often targets this down to a city and suburb! There’s currently visitors from all over the world, with USA and NZ most popular (of course ):
- USA
- California
- Alameda
- Bell Garden
- Scotts Valley
- San Francisco
- Texas
- Houston
- Irving
- Austin
- New York
- New York
- Victor
- Rochester
- Long Island City
- California
- New Zealand
- Auckland
- Christchurch
- Wellington
- Pukekohe
- North Shore
- Nelson
- Levin
- Porirua
A Month Since Preview Launch
Google makes reading and sifting through all of this information really easy and provides nice graphical reports along the way.
So, how are we doing for a new board games site that been around for just over a month?
The site had 1200 unique visitors reading 4000 pages, on average taking in 3 pages of info whilst they stayed here for about 2 minutes. I can also tell that 80% of that traffic is from new visitors which means 20% are returning visitors coming back to see what’s the latest on the site and it’s development. Of the new visitors 50% bounce straight back off the site, but half stay on and read further which is great considering the multitude search paths they may arrive from.
You can see from the graph when I was doing the initial promotion about a month ago and the direct effect that has on website traffic. It’s also interesting to see a consistent stream of visitors now that I’ve got my head down coding up the real site, and how this traffic is slowly and steadily growing.
Okay, so this has been a lesson in website analytics more than board games, but is really invaluable to a board games website designer like myself to help identify and target where and why gamers come to the site.
Thanks for reading.
-Dan
P.S. More updates about the present development progress coming soon.
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