Sell More Games

Last two months has been really busy and I haven’t put much attention to advertising. Actually, I haven’t done it at all. Until yesterday.

I hate advertising because I always feel like the only one that earns money is the Ad Server.  Even if clicks or impressions are not soo expensive it is hard to turn them into profits. Why? Games are either too cheap or too expensive.

But I read a book about AdWords and it gave me some inspiration. I also noticed that Pony World has quite good visitor to download ratio - over 40% of visitors download the game. With that ratio maybe it will not to that hard to turn AdWords into profits?

I created two ad variations for selected keywords and set up a daily budget of a little over $10. And today I got the results (that’s what I love about AdWords - almost instant results).

My ads received 90 clicks total: 51 for ad variation #1and 39 for ad variation #2. CTR for those ads: 1.55% for #1 and 1.22% for #2. Not so bad,  especially one you show it by keywords: the best CTR is 10.38% and the lowest one is 0.77%. The lowest one represents most of impressions and clicks.

Because that’s just 90 clicks I don’t know if it’s profitable yet or not, but we can do some estimations. Let’s go to Google Analytics and check if those clickers download the game. This is where we face first disappointment. Only 19.48% of clickers downloads the game. It’s still much better than what I had for Runes of Avalon campaign where only 11% of visitors downloaded the game.

If Pony World Deluxe has 1% CR (download to sale) then I need 100 downloads to sell one game. And I need 513 clicks to get 100 downloads. 513 clicks will cost me over $68. And I get only $17 out of each sale, so each sale makes me a loss of $51.

Judging just by those numbers you can for sure say that advertising is a waste of money. And it is if you do it wrong. It is if you aim short term. It is if you don’t tweak your ads, your game and your game description web page. It is if you don’t increase your visitor value.

It takes time to turn advertising into profits. Most people are not patient enough.

I made some tweaks to my ads and will do for at least few more days. If I can see improvements then I’ll keep advertising until I make a profit or run out of money :D

Google Adwords is an extremely popular place to advertise. It’s also extremely hard to do it right. When you’re indie, you don’t want to lose a single penny from your advertising budget. Here are 3 tips that can help you get more from Adwords.

1. Create different campaigns for content network and search ads or turn off content network. You’ll get a lot less clicks if you do so, but you may get much better conversion rates.

2. Use negative keywords. As a game developer you don’t want your ads to show up when someone is searching for serials, cracks or warez. You may also want to add free or freeware to your negative keywords. You want paying customers, not lurkers.

3. Test, test and once again test your ads. Use Google Analytics and ad variations to get the most out of your money.

And one more tip… use those 3 above. Act! reading only won’t get you far.

In Get the most out of your banner ads article I presented you technique to select the best banner for your advertising needs. In this article I will present you results of one of my tests.

A while ago I created a banner ad for Runes of Avalon. I’ve run couple of campaigns and had a feeling that it is not doing the best job. I decided to create new version and test if it will do better than the old one.

In one of my experiments with Google Website Optimizer I’ve learned that qouting a good review can increase page effectiveness very much so I wanted to check if it will work the same for banners. I added same review quota to my banner: one version with review on the top and one with review on the bottom.

I’ve set campaign details and waited couple of days for results. After about 60000 impressions I had a winner.

Screenshot above presents you results of last test. Previous test showed that banner with review on top has the worst CTR so I dropped it in final test.

As you can see original banner is 50% better. 0.09% CTR is still low, but it’s much better than 0.06%. Results prove once again that you always need to test, test and once again test. There is no 100% sure solution for advertising.

Banner ads are very popular. There is a lot of ad networks that let you advertise using banners. The problem is that banners are generaly not very effective (like almost all advertising). Depending on a banner and audience CTR may be as low as 0% and as high as few percent.

The good news is that you can maximize your advertising returns by testing your banner effectivess. All you need to do is to create 2-3 variations of your banner and check which one is the best. The problem is that most networks doesn’t let you test it and even if you run 2-3 ad campaigns one by one to check CTR you may get wrong results because conditions change. Your ad may get different response rate on weekdays, weekends, durign work hours and off hours.

That’s where Google AdWords come to play. Create 3 versions of same banner ad. Then create ad campaign targeted on sites. This is important, because when your ads are targetted on sites you pay per mille, not per click. You will get results faster and you will be able to check what audience has the site you advertise on. Pick 3-4 high volume traffic sites and set CPM to get high probability of displaying ad. Go to campaign settings and set:

• accelerated delivery method -> Show ads as quickly as possible - you want to get results as fast as possible,
• ad serving -> rotate: Show ads more evenly - this will let you pick up a winner sooner.

Invest $20 to $50 to receive about 30k impressions per veriation. You need a lot of impressions to make sure that your results are not accidentall. After you get requested amount of impressions go to Ad Variations tab and select a winner. You don’t need to advertise on Google AdWords any more (but you can). Take your best banner and put it to work in your favourite advertising network.

Try to make good banners, because sometimes it takes a lot of time for Google to approve your banners. I had to wait over 7 days to get my banners approved for one of my experiments.

Remember - all your banner ads should feature a call to action and offer a clear benefit to end users. Any web site that has a clear benefit to end users and actually delivers on that benefit will get positive advertising results.