Letterly gets a steady trickle of new players every day. A natural question is where they all come from, so I went and looked properly.
Two channels, and that is it
The answer was simpler than expected. Roughly half come straight in: a shared link, a bookmark, someone telling someone. The other big chunk comes from a single daily games directory that lists word games like Letterly. That one listing brings in around four in ten new players, and the day it went live shows up as a clear step in the chart.
Search engines send almost nobody. All the work on page titles and descriptions has done very little so far for a brand new game.
The directory players are not junk traffic either. Nearly everyone who arrives from it actually starts a round and finishes it, at the same rate as people who came from a friend.
Half the picture is missing
There was a catch in the numbers. The analytics only count people who accept cookies, which is how it should be. That turns out to be only about half of the players. So the analytics are fine for the mix of where people come from, but useless for how many people there are. The game's own records are the real count.
The fix is now in. When someone plays, the game notes the site that sent them there, as a short site name, nothing more, and keeps it with their scores. No tracking cookies, no profile. It is explained on the privacy page. That works for Cluster and Rankle too, so for the first time it is possible to see which sources bring players who come back, not just players who turn up once.
What this means for the next games
The lesson is that small web games live or die by being listed in the places where puzzle fans already look, and by being easy to share. So the plan is more of what is clearly working. Cluster and Rankle have now gone into the same kind of directories, and every game links to the others. Search can come later, if it comes at all.