Sell More Games

My last post: “Save 90% on ANAWIKI GAMES” was an April Fools joke. I am sure that no one (that is not out of his mind), including me, is going to fight piracy by increasing prices. Though I thought it suits April Fools perfectly I decided to give it a shot. A lot of people seemed to like it.

It was  also an example of guerilla marketing. I doubt we sold a single game due to this trick, but I am sure it did bring some attention to ANAWIKI (still, we broke the record of sales in one day, but it was probably the effect of last week PR).

Did you make any April Fools jokes?

Your game is your best marketing tool. If can, make one by one and you’ll be rich. The problem is, that most of us don’t have resources to do so.

One of the ways to obey this is to release a freeware game to promoto your site. Freeware game doesn’t require the same amount of polish and content as a commercial game. This means you can finish it faster. If you treat this little freeware game as an experiment to check if your game mechanics and ideas work, you may get great feedback and promote your site. Later, based on the feedback collected from your players you can build top-notch quality commercial game.

Amanda Fitch from Amaranth Games made her first game available for free. It was RPG game and was downloaded 1 millon times. She builded her site credibility and user base. And when she released Aveyond she had a lot of players waiting for game.

We, at ANAWIKI Games, try to do it a little different. We wanted to learn some new stuff and decided to create a little JigSaw game with artwork from our other games. The game is called ANAWIKI Puzzle Game and is available for PC and Mac Intel. The trick is that the name and game content promote ANAWIKI or our commercial games. The game was just released so I cannot say how popular it will be, but we’re planning to do commercial version of this game with a lot more artwork and game play modes. By the time we reach beta stage I hope to have enough feedback from our players and beta testers.

Take care and have a happy New Year 2008!

Year by year people spend a lot more shopping in December. But do they buy more digital games? I don’t have the stats to say yes or no, though I have some comments.

First of all - are you prepaired for Christmas? I am not. I feel bad because I had really cool ideas to spice up Christmas sales, but didn’t have time to work on them. I barely found the time to work on our newest game release. And that got me thinking…

I am sure more people is busy during Christmas. Everyone is looking for Christmas gifts, Christmas Tree, closing the year, haunting for the best New Years party. No time to play, no time to buy games. Anyway, can you imagine digital game as a gift? It doesn’t look good under the Christmas Tree.

A lot of companies offers promotional coupon codes, some even let you save 40% on purchase. Make something special for your customers that are generous enough to play your game(s) during the busiest period of the year. It doesn’t have to be a coupon code, but a coupon code is better that nothing. Use your imagination. And let me know how did it work for you.

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.