“There are 3 kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
-Mark Twain
When you’re running a game store, it’s easy to zero in on specific metrics or products.
You see a particular board game sitting on the shelf for months, and your instinct is to heavily discount it or cut your losses. Maybe a recent Facebook ad campaign underperformed, and you decide to pull all funding from that channel. These are common situations, but without understanding the full context, you could easily be making decisions that hurt your store in the long run.
Like pretty much everything else in life, in marketing and sales, context is crucial.
Evaluating products, promotions, or overall store performance in isolation—without considering the broader picture—can lead to focusing on short-term fixes rather than long-term gains.
This is a human problem, not just a business problem.
We have a natural tendency to overprioritize short term gains over long term and we often focus on optimizing small things, because they’re quick and easy to grasp, instead of larger, bigger-picture processes.
Imagine you have a new game in stock. A few months pass, and it’s not selling well. You might conclude that the game itself isn’t popular, but what if you’re missing the context?
Perhaps customers are unaware of how the game plays because it’s unfamiliar. Maybe it’s a hidden gem that could thrive with the right kind of introduction—like a demo day at your store or a social media post that explains its unique mechanics. If you looked at sales data alone, you’d miss the underlying potential.
For some products, just having them on the shelf is enough to get sales. For most products though, they need some help. Demos, marketing, employee advocates, shelf talkers, signage, lights, camera, Action! Without that stuff, they’d probably just sit there gathering dust, just waiting for the bargain bin.
Sometimes a game that’s underperforming isn’t the problem—the lack of marketing around it is. Or there’s a customer service problem, or a lack of education on the qualities of the game, or maybe it’s something as basic as the height of the shelf it’s sitting on or the lighting above it.
Context matters a lot.
I think a lot of us are math nerds at heart. If you’re in business, there’s a certain enjoyment in seeing sales tick up or a chart go up and to the right over time. We like to simplify things so we can say that “we did this, and it resulted in X”. I certainly do.
When working with game stores, I love being able to point to an ad campaign and say “The Return on Ad Spend for this campaign averaged 9.5x” That’s $9.50 in revenue for every $1 in advertising spend.
And being able to do that with marketing is great. Knowing and quantifying how a particular message or channel is performing is a powerful tool.
But marketing and business (and life) isn’t as clean cut as we’d like it to be.
When you consider how the game fits into your overall ecosystem, you start to see opportunities. Pair it with other best-selling products or promote it alongside similar games, and suddenly that slow mover might become a star.
Isolated Metrics Can Lead to Misleading Insights
Gary Ray recently wrote a post on Facebook (the inspiration for this article) about his store’s inventory shift over the last three months. He mentioned how he decided to go full bore into Warhammer 40k and make his shop Top of Mind for that product line.
Gary is a big advocate for managing a game store by the numbers, and looking at inventory metrics to make decisions, so in his analysis this decision to go deep into 40k came with a corresponding cost.
Roughly $2800 of that inventory isn’t performing up to snuff. According to the numbers, those products should be ruthlessly cut to make room for better performing stock.
And if everything were boiled down into the numbers on the spreadsheet, that would be the right call.
But that inventory has to be looked at more holistically. In Gary’s case, it’s serving a distinct purpose: his store has everything a current (or potentially interested) 40k player might need.
This is a strong business advantage that’s hard to quantify on a spreadsheet.
Marketing channels are another area where context is key. A single campaign on Facebook or Google Ads might have a low conversion rate, and the knee-jerk reaction is to cut spending.
But consider what the ad was doing: Was it the first touchpoint for a lot of people? Were customers engaging but converting elsewhere later on, perhaps in-store? Looking only at the immediate conversion metrics in isolation can lead to missing how each part of the customer journey builds up to a final sale.
Analyzing the metrics available is still important, but you have to incorporate as many of the relevant variables as you can, or you might be coming to the wrong conclusions.
Understanding how ads or promotions work together is crucial. A lot of game stores run events that get people through the door, and these events don’t always generate direct revenue from ticket sales alone. However, they create engagement, build community, and lead to bigger sales down the road.
By taking a holistic view—understanding that events, content, ads, and community work together—you get a clearer picture of what’s truly driving success.
Optimizing for the Right Thing: Short-Term vs. Long-Term Gains
When you focus on individual metrics or short-term performance, it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees. You might decide to cut down on in-store events because they aren’t directly profitable, but what about the longer-term impact on customer loyalty?
What about the players who become regulars after having an amazing experience at your store during those events?
The same goes for product offerings. The context of your audience matters.
Stocking a bunch of varieties of Monopoly near the front of your store may sound like a massive waste of inventory dollars if they aren’t selling. But they may also be responsible for bringing in customers that would be intimidated by racks of miniatures or complex games with decades of history and lore.
Looking at your store more broadly, as an integrated machine with a variety of systems working together, might give you a better perspective on how something specific is performing.
Optimizing your sales strategy isn’t just about chasing what’s hot right now—it’s about understanding your customers, their journey, and what builds relationships over time.
Context Creates Opportunities
Ultimately, context helps you make smarter decisions. Rather than simply reacting to data in isolation, you can connect the dots across different aspects of your business.
You’ll know when a product needs a little extra love through community events, when an ad campaign is planting seeds for later harvest, and when something that looks like a loss today is actually an investment in customer loyalty.
Running a game store isn’t just about selling boxes—it’s about creating experiences and building a community.
When you put individual data points back into context, you can start optimizing not for the immediate sale, but for the long-term health of your business.