Facebook ads work!

Yo, I know a lot of you have spent quite a bit of time designing and developing your project. I have too. I can say with absolute certainty that Facebook ads helps build your game's awareness like woah.. I struggled for a few days and tried to find the best way to get a game I worked on to the public and dude, facebook ads work...

I spent 10 damn dollars... like no S***, ten actual dollars and got 1000 people talking about / downloading / sharing. Apparently (as of September 1st of 2018) Facebook is hitting more people than google in regard to website and app awareness.

If someone Installs your game from a Google ad, it costs between 2 to 120 dollars. With Facebook, it's .14-18 cents to 4.00 dollars **From my experience**.

Point being, If you aren't using Facebook Ads, you should... At least for now..

I'm dropping a hundred dollars on it tomorrow morning. I'll post the results if yall wanna see it.

 

Id give it a couple days, my previous fb ad experience was facebook faking a bunch of activity so they got paid quicker...

 

I am on day Five now. I spent 10 bucks on it and got a substantial amount of hits (or so I thought)... Today, like three hours ago, I got a promotion for Google Adwords. If I spent 25 bucks, they would offer me a 100 dollar coupon...

...

Literally about an HOUR in I had 14k impressions and 250 'clicks' for $7.43.. I like the ease of Facebook but Google is hands down the way to go...

https://ibb.co/mEyvvK

 

I've tried both before, using banner ads to promote newly released apps (in an effort to boost those early downloads and hopefully gain traction). My experience with facebook was lackluster. I didn't go very big budget, maybe 10-15 dollars like you did, but didn't really show impressive results, in fact it felt like only a handful of people went all the way through to download.

With admob I've had better performance - and I think the reason for that is people who are surfing facebook are just less likely to switch over to playing a game while they are doing their social browsing... perhaps in the future that'll change, or perhaps just pouring more money in works better, but I ended up using admob more often.

EDIT: I was using admob/adwords (whatever they call it) to do adverts directly to mobile users... this also probably had an effect because they already had the device in hand, and were probably already playing games...

 

WHAT OS ARE YOU USING!!!!
Windows 3.1?

 

This sounds about right. I haven't looked at numbers in a while but last I checked mobile advertising numbers were in the vicinity of $3 per install (though this would vary widely depending on what you were advertising to who). That is a near perfect match to a "handful" of installs for $10-$15.

 

Windows 95b brother, I even got USB support

 

It's actually coming out to bout 80 cents an install currently but it fluctuates every three hours or so.

 

Honestly, I find the best form of advertising is to just tweet on Twitter. Hands down, the best free marketing I've ever seen.

Tweet a message about your Product(s), and use the proper hashtags, and believe it or not, you can hit over 100K Impressions if you do it right in the matter of hours.

 

What kind of hashtags would you recommend? I never really thought about hashtags and twitter.

 

It really comes down to who your target audience is, use the hashtags that can represent the audience.
E.G. - fps online games could use simply #FPS, #OnlineGaming, #War, etc, etc. Just examples, but ya get what I mean, target the hashtags to your audience, some will do better than others, it really just comes down to trial and error to what may or may not work, some are more searched for than others, others aren't so much.

 

I'll give it a shot man!!

 

Keep in mind to do it at least twice per day for the same tweet. Things in twitter feeds generally only get seen once, Twitter feeds are a lot more chaotic, so make sure you do a tweet that is engaging in some way. E.G. - Screen Shots, Video, etc. I mean, nothing wrong with regular tweets, but statistics show photos and video get a lot more retention.

EDIT:
Also Note: Be sure to tweet all the time!!!! I can't stress that enough, people will follow you, and unfollow you for lack of tweeting content... Pretty vicious community honestly.

 

I assure ya, it can't be worse than the nazi's on reddit. I have never used twitter to be honest but I'll try it out.

 

Ive used both facebook ads and google ads extensively now. Facebook ads work, google ads do not. At least in my case.

Facebook ads make a $2:1 return on ad spend. I have spent $10,000 on facebook ads over the last two months.

Try it, start small. Be brave, leave them running at a low cost and increase the spend if your results are favourable in a weeks time.

In my case i optimise ad deliver to people that would buy IAP (F2P mobile game). It can take a week for people to convert so be patient. But also be careful and above all else, make sure your data is reporting correctly.

 

It's odd that you mention the data being reported correctly. I am currently looking at 20k views (third day advertising) with 10k interactions. What's weird is that ON the playstore, things don't update but like once every few days. Google Publish services take 3-8 hours and are often not correct (like it's a day or two behind, not that the data is blatantly incorrect)..

As for waiting on users to convert, what do you mean by this? CTR? There is a WHOLE other side to this that I didn't foresee being This large in scale.

 

I wonder if you guys are using analytics to gather your data, or if you just get it from the advertiser? I've considered using analytics that allow me to detect when a new user shows up from an ad, but hadn't found a good plugin that lets me do that yet.

 

Platforms stats are delayed. My assumption is that those stats being a few hours or days or sometimes even weeks delayed doesn't really affect their bottom line.

As for converting, it's a general term used to define if a person completes your funnel, e.g. clicks ad -> installs app could be your entire funnel. In my case it's clicks ad -> makes in app purchase. On the facebook ad manager, if set it up correctly, you can see when users that have clicked your ad the go on to spend money in your app, that money is then attributed to your that specific ad campaign so you can see if the return on investment (roi) is acceptable.

This doesn't however account for ad revenue or platform revenue share so you might need to not go directly by this value but some adjusted value or multiple metrics, I use 'cost per session' and 'in app purchase value' to measure how effective the users I am finding are and choose the most optimal campaigns.

There is also a conversion window, either 30 days, 7 days or 1 day, whatever it is you set, however i think if your ad campaign is set to optimise for app installs then the conversion window is only ever 1 day, and that means it also stops attributing your in app purchase revenue beyond 1 day from the install, so it ends up looking extremely weak.

Edit: At least that's how i believe it works anyway.

 

We are only using facebook analytics, which i think is fine. Their analytics seem to work well and it is in their best interest not to mislead ad customers as that would hurt long term trust and revenue.

There are platforms that help you aggregate multiple advertises in one place, if you are using multiple ad platforms and a user sees you ad in multiple places it's possible they might get tracked on multiple systems and ultimately get counted twice. This is bad as it can make your conversion numbers look better than they are in reality.

Another good thing to do is track the date you start an ad campaign so you can match it up with any change in stats you see on the platforms, like iTunes Connect and the Google Dev Console. That should help you validate your results and give you some confidence that it is actually working.

Edit:

Again a caveat to everything I've said here, I'm also new at this. So don't take everything I say as the truth, do your own research. I'm likely wrong or under-informed about a few things.

 

You have a leg up on me (and probably several other people). Though I will and have been doing a lot of research myself, you have definitely helped steer me in the right direction! Ty sir!

 

They sure do. Keep and eye on them though. Their returns can fluctuate a bit depending on who else is advertising at the time so make sure you have bid caps set or you'll burn through ad budget in expensive times for no real gains.

 

Was that how you got such high downloads, using the ads? Or did you also get featured? because for an indie you have done incredibly well, would love to pick your brains and gleen some info on how you got so successful, it cant be luck 3 times in a row on multiple platforms!

 

Well... it can be. Haha

Major Mayhem 1 had a boost from our publisher Adult Swim at the time. We got in touch with them as I worked with them at my previous job. They also have a good relationship with apple and google so we got some stellar features back when only 4 games a week got featured and those features could generate 1 million downloads in the USA. But, Major Mayhem was also a failure at launch when it was $1 and wasn’t until we made it ftp that it took off. I think that game was special for the time and still is a bit so it gets good word of mouth. Sadly though it’s business model isn’t strong enough to market through ad platforms.

Mini golf was right place right time for us, we got offered a good deal from Scopely and they marketed the game pretty hard. It was also just a good game in its own right and very viral in nature, not only in getting people to get others to play but for those players to keep each other playing. that's the strength of async turn gameplay i guess.

Between Mini golf and Major Mayhem 2 there was actually another project, a skiing game that we worked on for almost 2 years before we realised there wasn't really a business model there and so we cancelled it. - The lesson here is that it's easy to see other peoples successes, but not their failures. Trust me, they all have failures too. But instead of trying to flog a dead horse, move on. We should have moved on a year earlier, but I was too stubborn. Lesson learned.

Major Mayhem 2 has a good audience to draw on from MM1. So that was a little easier, it's also very well presented and extremely polished so it makes the platforms want to feature it. Unfortunately Apple didn't feature us this time but there's always tomorrow i guess.

Major Mayhem 2 is the first time I've started marketing myself and so far out of the 9 million downloads we have, with Facebook I've driven 63,828 installs across iOS and Android. Features on Android account for about 4 million downloads (mostly in india, I don't know why). and the rest... who knows. The good part is those 63,828 downloads have had a 2x return on investment as i'm targeting people who spend.

But I think there's one common theme here. We've spent a long time (over 8 years as Rocket Jump, and 4-5 years before that at PikPok) and a lot of effort building really really good games. But we haven't stopped there. There's always some backup plan if it doesn't just take off by itself (hoping for featuring is not a business plan). And we've also tried to leveraged the position we're in to build to a stronger position in the future.

 

What you are looking for is an attribution platform, to track which campaigns all your installs come from, one of the leading ones is AppsFlyer, they support desk top web clicks as well.

 

What kind of creative did you use, would you mind sharing it? Was it a static picture, a short video?
What sort of ad did you create, one optimised for CPM or for CPI?
Did you A/B test multiple creatives?

I ran a small campaign recently with about $50 and only got about 30 clicks to my site (not installs).