We tested a lot of things too. I didn’t update this topic because it seemed to me that the community here is getting flooded with people who don’t have a business plan and just struggle their way to code their apps. For the technical part of coding it’s great, but it’s not enough to succeed.
Anyway I’ll share the results we had so far, maybe it will help someone and encourage others to share their experience too.
- Facebook Ads
We tried promoting the game’s fan page: https://www.facebook.com/BooBooPets using CPM, CPC and their auto-optimizing options. It’s great that you can target very specific age groups and interests (which is a great plus for our game which is not for everyone). The cost for clicks/impressions is decent, but the actual value of the likes/users is not worth it in the end.
We are now trying to promote the actual game (itunes link). We expect to get better results because we can target only iOS users. But it will be hard to see the results because there’s no way to track the installs because Corona didn’t implement this api from Facebook.
- AdMob
AdMob is cool because you can target people by country, age, gender and device. The downside is that people will tap accidentally a lot. If you researched this topic like we did, you would find that biding 0.01 per click will be enough to deplete your daily budget in minutes. It’s not the case anymore.
They have a way of tracking the conversions. We only implemented it in the latest update which we released today, so we’re still waiting for the stats and pushing more money to get some better idea.
- BuySell Ads
I’m not going to name where I bought the ad spots, but I’m gonna say they are on some well known ones in ios apps.
I’m gonna share stats from 2 campaigns to get an idea:
Cost Clicks Impressions CTR
$150.00 89 44,232 0.20%
$137.50 36 23,062 0.16%
My conclusion is that they are only going to perform well with a huge budget and mostly for brand awareness, not actual conversions.
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Press Release
We used prMac’s writing and distribution service. I’m very satisfied with their writing and their service. It didn’t generate any substantial downloads, but I think it’s important to have a professional press release to include in your press kit and sent the word out about your game. But unless your game is something revolutionary, it probably won’t be reviewed by big sites and you will get a lot of mails from smaller sites that published your press release to ask you to buy some ad packs from them.
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Word of mouth/of social media
Integrate some viral social media features that make sens and that people will want to share with their friends. Just by asking users to share something that there’s no reason for them to share won’t get you anywhere.
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Getting featured by Apple
We got featured in both subcategories of the game. The downloads increased a lot and started to go down to the regular number as the game went down to lower pages.
So making a good game (not revolutionary - if it’s revolutionary you probably won’t need a lot of marketing) will bring you that. But you should already have that in mind before starting coding it.
Sorry for the long post. I hope it will help someone who is researching this. And take everything I said with a bit of salt on it. It’s just our experience so far. Your game is not the same as ours, so take that into account.
Also our game is free (https://itunes.apple.com/app/booboo-pets/id597153210?ls=1&mt=8). For a payed game you should probably take a different approach on marketing. [import]uid: 70003 topic_id: 35852 reply_id: 145762[/import]
