Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with the Long Tail, which describes the large population of rare events, which applied to business means that the vast quantity of low selling items make up a large proportion of total sales.
Jakob Nielsen has now come up with a similar concept called The Slow Tail: Time Lag Between Visiting and Buying.
Summary:
Users often convert to buyers long after their initial visit to a website. A full 5% of orders occur more than four weeks after users click on search engine ads.
He quotes data from a large study where half of the sales occurred within 28 minutes of the first visit. However, the remaining sales took much longer. 75% occurred in 24 hours, 90% in 12 days, but the last 5% took more than 4 weeks.
He then goes on and gives some excellent implications of these numbers. Read the whole thing.
The Slow Tail definitely applies to a shareware business. In fact, my experience is that the Slow Tail in shareware is much larger than Nielsen's numbers. This is probably because the download of a trial version adds another step to the process, delaying the sale in comparison to businesses without trial downloads.
The current practice in the casual game industry seems to be to ignore the Slow Tail altogether. The one hour trial has become very common. A one hour trial picks up only that first burst of business and ignores the remaining Slow Tail. The ideal would be to try to get that initial burst and then try to pick up the Slow Tail as it arises.
This data also shows a glaring weakness in Google and Overture (Yahoo)'s conversion tracking system. Both systems only track conversions that come within 30 days of the initial click. This needs to be 90 to give you accurate data.
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