I have tried Facebook ads for our new game but the results are catastrophic.
172 impressions
4 clicks
Cost: $5 !!!
Anyone can share their experience with facebook ads ?
The ad was for mobile game promotion with nice graphics on the ad, so nothing wrong there.
Regards,
Damir.
HI.
We did it for 3 days. We got better results than you but a the conversion rate was 0 so we standby that for now.
Total Impressions: 18,577
Total Click: 158
Daily Budget: 10$
An average of 50 clicks by day.
The cost per click for us would be: $0.19
The first day we include more country than US, (France, China, Japan, South Korean) as our game got featured in Japan and China. We hoped with this campaign to increase our visibility in USA a bit.
The day 2 and 3 we focus only on USA and we narrow down some criteria as well.
We increase the price before the campaign it did not affect the download trends we had already.
For the effect of the campaign seems none, as we have the same download rate.
After i think the budget we are talking are very small. Maybe some better experience feedback with higher budget?
I actually just ran a small test campaign on Facebook and was quite happy with the results:
I did run some campaigns a few months ago for a different app with less good performance – my CTR’s were more like 2-2.5%, and my cost per install was well over $1.
Not surprisingly, your CTR will depend a lot on the creatives you use. And your conversion rate will depend a lot on whether your app is paid or free. Paid apps will always have extremely low conversion rates.
Damir, if you had a budget of $5 and only got 172 impressions, it might be that your audience targeting was set up strangely, or you weren’t using optimized CPM pricing.
Hi Andrew,
What was the game you promote? It was a free or paid install?
For us it was a paid app.
It’s a free game. (It’s only available in one small market now, which I’m using as a test market before a broader launch.)
Thank you so much guys for your info.
When we launched our game 20 days ago we set a few CPC campaigns (Charboost, inMobi, adinch, iAd, millenial media) spending about $500 but we didn’t see any special increase in downloads.
I have to say the game is for sure high-quality and it was built upon the success of our very similar Android game (“Ultimate BlackJack 3D”) which is very well rated and got excellent reviews.
Our new game, “Ultimate BlackJack Reloaded” for iOS is improved in every aspect and we got our first independent review which is excellent (review on appPicker).
I am telling you this because some might think the problem is in a not enough quality game.
What I have learned from CPC is that it is totally unpredictable, you can not measure the campaign success and some of my calculations shows it is even more expensive then the lowest CPI campaigns I found ($0,50).
Andrew, your results show exactly this, the lowest CPI you can get is around $0,50 (for iOS).
My conclusion for now is that I never will use any CPC campaigns, and only CPI.
But for CPI campaigns to be profitable, you have to know your user lifetime value.
If someone knows an ad network which has CPI bellow $0,50, please let us know.
I agree that CPI campaigns are nice, since it takes the CTR and conversion rate risk away (or it masks it within your CPI bid, which is another story…)
I’m still curious how you could run a Facebook campaign for $5 and get only 172 impressions and 4 clicks. What were the settings for your campaign (bid type, type of ad, audience targetting, etc.), if you don’t mind my asking?
Sure Andrew no problem.
This ad targets 64,000,000 people:
Optimization: Your bid will be optimized to get more mobile app installs
Pricing: You will be charged every time someone sees your ad or sponsored story (CPM).
Interesting.
One thing to keep in mind is that with the Optimized CPM feature, Facebook sets your bids for you based on it’s running estimate of the long-term CTR of your ad. If it happens to have poor early performance (low CTR), Facebook will set your bids quite high. On a budget of only $5, it’s hard to recover from that.
Also, you might consider targeting your ad based on user interests. Instead of targeting 64 million people, target a narrower demographic of age, gender (for a blackjack game, I might suggest targeting only men), and based on interests. If you target correctly, you get a higher CTR and therefore lower cost per click.
Thank you for the tips Andrew.
I tried CPC $0.05 but got no clicks at all.
The lowest CPC on mobile ad networks I found was $0.03.
Would be great if someone would like to cross-promote my game, we could discuss the business model.
As I said, I have a great app, now need good marketing.
Are you guys tracking installs? Can you enlighten me on how to do so? Do you simply add the fb info to your build.settings? Or is there something else you need to do?
The Facebook ad dashboard does do conversion tracking for me on iOS. I didn’t do anything specifically to enable that other than having the right Facebook info in my build.settings. On Android, however, the conversion tracking didn’t work. It’s possible I just need to call facebook.publishInstall() (http://docs.coronalabs.com/daily/api/library/facebook/publishInstall.html), I just haven’t tried it yet.
HI.
We did it for 3 days. We got better results than you but a the conversion rate was 0 so we standby that for now.
Total Impressions: 18,577
Total Click: 158
Daily Budget: 10$
An average of 50 clicks by day.
The cost per click for us would be: $0.19
The first day we include more country than US, (France, China, Japan, South Korean) as our game got featured in Japan and China. We hoped with this campaign to increase our visibility in USA a bit.
The day 2 and 3 we focus only on USA and we narrow down some criteria as well.
We increase the price before the campaign it did not affect the download trends we had already.
For the effect of the campaign seems none, as we have the same download rate.
After i think the budget we are talking are very small. Maybe some better experience feedback with higher budget?
I actually just ran a small test campaign on Facebook and was quite happy with the results:
I did run some campaigns a few months ago for a different app with less good performance – my CTR’s were more like 2-2.5%, and my cost per install was well over $1.
Not surprisingly, your CTR will depend a lot on the creatives you use. And your conversion rate will depend a lot on whether your app is paid or free. Paid apps will always have extremely low conversion rates.
Damir, if you had a budget of $5 and only got 172 impressions, it might be that your audience targeting was set up strangely, or you weren’t using optimized CPM pricing.
Hi Andrew,
What was the game you promote? It was a free or paid install?
For us it was a paid app.
It’s a free game. (It’s only available in one small market now, which I’m using as a test market before a broader launch.)
Thank you so much guys for your info.
When we launched our game 20 days ago we set a few CPC campaigns (Charboost, inMobi, adinch, iAd, millenial media) spending about $500 but we didn’t see any special increase in downloads.
I have to say the game is for sure high-quality and it was built upon the success of our very similar Android game (“Ultimate BlackJack 3D”) which is very well rated and got excellent reviews.
Our new game, “Ultimate BlackJack Reloaded” for iOS is improved in every aspect and we got our first independent review which is excellent (review on appPicker).
I am telling you this because some might think the problem is in a not enough quality game.
What I have learned from CPC is that it is totally unpredictable, you can not measure the campaign success and some of my calculations shows it is even more expensive then the lowest CPI campaigns I found ($0,50).
Andrew, your results show exactly this, the lowest CPI you can get is around $0,50 (for iOS).
My conclusion for now is that I never will use any CPC campaigns, and only CPI.
But for CPI campaigns to be profitable, you have to know your user lifetime value.
If someone knows an ad network which has CPI bellow $0,50, please let us know.
I agree that CPI campaigns are nice, since it takes the CTR and conversion rate risk away (or it masks it within your CPI bid, which is another story…)
I’m still curious how you could run a Facebook campaign for $5 and get only 172 impressions and 4 clicks. What were the settings for your campaign (bid type, type of ad, audience targetting, etc.), if you don’t mind my asking?
Sure Andrew no problem.
This ad targets 64,000,000 people:
Optimization: Your bid will be optimized to get more mobile app installs
Pricing: You will be charged every time someone sees your ad or sponsored story (CPM).
Interesting.
One thing to keep in mind is that with the Optimized CPM feature, Facebook sets your bids for you based on it’s running estimate of the long-term CTR of your ad. If it happens to have poor early performance (low CTR), Facebook will set your bids quite high. On a budget of only $5, it’s hard to recover from that.
Also, you might consider targeting your ad based on user interests. Instead of targeting 64 million people, target a narrower demographic of age, gender (for a blackjack game, I might suggest targeting only men), and based on interests. If you target correctly, you get a higher CTR and therefore lower cost per click.