Glyph Posts and Glyph Sales Compared

I've been talking the last few months about recording glyph posting, so I could compare it to the number of glyphs sold. While I've been recording the data for a long time, I have only just begun to analyse it.

In order to give everyone a sneak peak, I've produced a the graph above for just a small window of just over five days. The blue line represents glyphs posted and is divided by 10, and the red line is glyphs sold. The graph is divided into hours. So the first blue spike is me posting 738 glyphs between noon and quarter past. The first few data points for sales are 2 glyphs sold between 1pm and 2pm, 2 glyphs sold between 2pm and 3pm, nothing sold between 3pm and 4pm, 7 glyphs sold between 4pm and 5pm and so on.

Although this is a very small sample size, it is worth noting just how sharply glyph sales fall off 12 hours after posting, leading me to conclude that posting twice per day wouldn't be a waste of my time (or at least the second posting won't suffer from diminishing returns).

While only a sneak peak, it gives me the confidence to say that a good post yields sales of between 5 and 10% of glyphs posted (my posting schedule is explained bellow), and a nice visual to explain to people that only dabble in the market what to expect in terms of unsold glyph auctions.

My next steps for this analysis will include:

• Improved graphing over a longer period of time. I will include a separate scale for glyphs posted to glyphs sold, rather than just divide the number posted by something arbitrary.
• A metric for the average number of glyphs sold for each hour after posting, and the average yield in terms of both sales and gold value.
• Taking suggestions from readers about what else would be useful and/or awesome.

Naturally all this data is limited by my particular server, posting schedule and competition. My main limitation with this data is that I post on two different characters (probably soon to be three in patch 5.4) and it is potentially beyond the scope of the exercise to track who sells what.* For example, the large spikes are where both characters post a full set of glyphs in quick succession, and the smaller spikes are where they post further apart.

The major influence on the yield of sales is that I post two of each glyph rather than one (or more). I post two because it is much more time efficient to post two of each glyph once per day than it is to post one of each glyph twice per day. Particularly when I generally collect my mail while I'm AFK. That brings up its own metric to explore: the number times I actually sell two of a particular type of glyph between posts, and if there's any pattern (e.g., some very popular glyphs may warrant posting in larger numbers).

As I've mentioned a bazillion times before, I never cancel glyphs, and post at my fallback when the price goes under my threshold (in order to cap my competitions ceiling on resetting).

In other news, my inability to display more than a tiny fragment of my collected data in a spreadsheet has inspired my to get my web application up and running on a newly upgraded server, so I'll be slicing my data every which way over the coming months.


* It should be very much in scope, since the posting and selling data are both recorded with character and server information, so the analysis can be split and recombined.