Sell More Games

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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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