Today I received email from Google that my ads are disapproved. The reason:

Gabling Certificate Required

What? What the hell? Do I look like casino? Here’s my ad:

Avalon Legends Solitaire
Restore the Deck of Nature and save
Avalon. 200 hands. Free trial.
www.Anawiki.com

I guess that’s the last time I use Adwords, unless until they seriously improve their service. Too bad, as working with adwords was a good way of improving your ad copy before going “world wide”.

The world has a lot of holidays and you can’t keep the track of each of them, but it’s good to know at least the most common one (for the world) or the most money squeezing ones.

Black Friday is the day following Thanksgiving Day in the United States, traditionally the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. Basically, people go out to retail stores and malls to buy things. Cyber Monday is online world reaction Black Friday. People spent their money from home.

It’s good to have the list of those holidays and make your marketing up to date. We indie’s don’t need to follow big companies, but at least we can try to get best examples of them. It’s also good to know about holidays because they may get in face of your game launch. I started the launch of Dress-Up Pups last week. I was about to send press release about it until I realized that it’s Thanksgiving day and either nobody is at work or gives a damn about my games. If I sent my PR that day it would probably got lost in dozens of emails by Monday morning when everybody gets to work.

That said, today is Cyber Morning, if you want you can take advantage of it and save 25% on your order of Anawiki Games :D

Being portal friendly limits our ways of catching customers. We can’t do much beside the trial version. We can’t even let users create and share content for our games (at least you can’t do it with portal versions).

To raise the prices portals invented premium / collectors editions. Those editions have extra content, which urges customers to buy those games, but there is very limited number of games that can be released as premium editions.

Any ideas how to bust your sales for “standard” games?

If your business is dependent on free customers, you do not have a business. You do not have any kind of “real” business until you have the ability to buy advertising from a variety of available sources and transform that traffic into sales and profits.

Perry specialises in Google Adwords and in this newsletter he talked about free traffic from Google… free thanks to SEO. He points out that if your business relies just on SEO traffic then after another Google Dance you may wake up on page 6 instead of page 1 in search results (or even page 60). And if you don’t know how to buy traffic that converts into sales then you’re running a risky business… in our case you just develop games. Sometimes it’s enough (portals help a lot if you have a great game), but very often is not.

Though even if your strategy relies on free traffic it doesn’t mean you are doomed. Just don’t forget to collect customers informations. When your source of free traffic dries up you can convert existing customers into buyers again (and again (and again))… and if you’re smart you don’t wait until it dries up, you send newsletters already.

Learn the conversion puzzles while you have some money to burn… the best time to do it is after you release your game and get sales peak… when it ends it’s usually too late.

So, why, precisely, do you have an ad budget?

If your ads work, if you can measure them and they return more profit than they cost, why not keep buying them until they stop working?

And if they don’t work, why are you running them?

If I just had the ad that works… I still couldn’t buy all I want – credit card limits :D

But I don’t have the ads that work and I still run them from time to time. Why? Because I hope that this time they will work. Because on different site they may work. Because I am not sure if they work or not. Maybe my tracking mechanism is inaccurate? Or maybe I just like wasting money (at least those are my own dollars).

But seriously, if you have the ad that works why not buy it until your credit card limit?

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?

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!

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.

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.

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.