Since it is a new Monday morning (at least where I am :) ) I thought I'd start the week with an interesting question:

What is a good ratio of website visitors to free version downloaders? And what is a good ratio of free version downloaders to full version purchasers?

Obviously ideally these ratios would be 1:1, meaning every visitor to the site bought a game. But since this is very unlikely, roughly what kind of ratios would make you think you're on the right track to success?

I'm sure Steve or someone with more experience can answer this more fully, but the research I've done indicates that for games, conversion ratios (downloads to purchases) hovers in the 1-5% range. Lower for most games and PC games, higher for high-quality, well-known, and PDA games. I tend to use 2-3% in my calculations. A lot depends on marketing, but I don't think you can ever really plan on exceeding about 5% (but keep in mind that going from 2% to 3% is a 50% increase, not a 1% increase).

I don't know about ratios of visitors to downloads or visitors to buyers. Interesting question.

It's hard to tell the visitors vs. downloaders ratio because a single visitor may download multiple games per visit. But the # of downloads we get per days is greater than 50% of the number of visitors per day, although it can vary quite a bit. If we send out a newsletter, for instance, we'll see a spike in downloads within the next 48 hours.

I'd say a good registration rate is anything above 1% -- that would probably be well above average. 1-2% is pretty good for a decent game with good registration incentives. Some games will do much better than this, especially if it's something people would look for specifically, like a hearts cards game.