I get few emails every now and then about advertising my apps.
I don’t know if they are legit or if they can deliver.
For the past year and a half, right after Steve passed away and Apple has fallen behind in terms of handling the amount of new Apps pouring into the App Store. Thus all games that i created with no exception since that day and onward has not seen more than one or two downloads a day, and probably by mistake! hahaha
Most of us are suffering from that, yet we continue!
I used one of these guys, that i found and i have seen an increase in downloads from 1 or 2 downloads a day to 600 downloads a day for 3 continuous days, which brought my App right to the top 100. Problem is, right after the 3 days were over, the App plunged to it’s winter long sleep of bears(Hibernation)!
It cost me $300. Which i got from promoting my apps. Yes the only thing that makes money now a days is sticking ads in your app! yeeeeeaaaahhhhh
Sad thing that our games became a container for ads! But it’s the game and we have to deal with it!
Anyone has a successful advertising technic? business? or would like to buy my games? hahaha
What was the quality of users you obtained? Wouldn’t surprise me if you paid $300 for a bunch of bots. Did they convert into paying users or hang around?
For advertising I would look to reputable companies. Start with the companies whose ads you have used.
Honestly I’m not sure if advertising as in buying banners etc. really does anything at all these days. I’ve heard an example of a fellow dev who bought very prominent ad space on a big gaming site that cost at least 10k$, and the conversion rate into sales was abysmally bad. It was a steam game with classic buy once pricing model, maybe mobile market is different.
If I was looking to spend money on ads, I’d look for a prominent youtuber who has a target audience with good overlap to your target audience, and make a brand deal. They’ll usually only do that though, if your product is up to their standards, because I’d hope they have at least some integrity left. With smaller youtube channels you might get some exposure by doing givaway promotions, but for that to work you need something that has a perceived value for people. To me personally (and I’m most likely weird regarding these things) any premium content in a free2play game is nothing but bait, and I’m not interested (unless I could sell it on ebay for real money or something like that).
My rule is to never buy the ´help´of someone who randomly contacts me. I helped a team on a project for KS a few years ago, and as soon as they launched, they received all these con-man emails about helping them promote their KS. It was all a scam because everything they used as measurements were things they could bot.
This guy took your money and then paid some site like SEOCLERKS or whatever to hire 600 people at 5 cents each to download your app. Fiverr is not a good example, but there are many website that offer microjobs where the task is to download an app, usually the make less than a dime each. They are similar to PTC sites.
none of those 600 people will convert… these guys are getitng a dime, they download, get credit then delete and download the next app on their list.
If they contact you asking for $$ for review/download - dont its a scam. its always a scam.
ad companies…
HeyZap
Unity
if youre not getting more than 500 downloads a day, I wouldnt bother with any ads. Youre more likely to end up with negative reviews than any financial gain.
I’ve seen a horribly done 2D seasonal holiday game listed as having well over 1 million downloads and yet have only a thousand or maybe it was hundreds of reviews. I’ve complained any the dishonestly of calling yourself a search engine when what you are in fact is an advertising shill and that’s what Google and other such search engines are. Obviously some holiday game that looks like they tried to enlarge 16x16 pixel icons to use as game art to be FHD using Windows Paint hasn’t had over 1 million downloads.
The paid advertisements Google & the like earn are supposed to partly fund and support the development of a reputable search engine as Google’s ‘core business’ but when you are using it and you keep seeing ‘Urban Dictionary’ at the top of their non-paid results you know they ain’t got a clue.
LOL, I’ve went back to reading man pages and using the CRC Standard Mathematical Tables and Formulae as a quicker way to solve a problem than try to pick through Google’s results for something relevant. I even use Unity HTML documentation now even though it resets to that annoying home page seeming with each use of the browser buttons.
The 600 didn’t convert and that’s why it was strange to me not seeing any activities other than the rise of downloads per day from 1 or 2 to 600 for the spam of the 3 days.
Advertising through channels like Google AdMod and other known advertising incs will not work for me because i don’t make that much and throwing $1000 at it, will yield nothing!
I think i need tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands to throw at advertising to actually yield a decent result.
So my only choice is to use these guys that will pump the download per day for few days in hope that it will be picked up by others once it ranks higher.
My game actually ranked in the first 100 during those 3 days, which gave my game some exposure.
But it plunged right down after that! as if Apple’s system is detecting such an activities, thus bringing down the game to it’s natural rank back again!
But i ran out of choices, who else can i use?
Or any other solution? i am listing
Well I’d say it means you stop working on that game and start working on a new game. The players of that game have spoken. I wouldn’t bother advertising the new game either. It’s good or it is not good.
goat, the case would be true if people saw the game and it didn’t become a hit. I will toss it and work with something else.
But the game is not even seen, so how would i know if people like it or not!
BoredMormon, i am not spamming the app store, it’s already spammed with tons of garbage nowadays
I think the way businesses like that work, is that they have regular users collected through their web site and or social media. But the quality of those users is unknown!
So you can’t form a straight out decision.
Very important distinction that I think a lot of folks get confused about. There is this myth that if you make a great game then suddenly somehow magically everyone will know about it. Makes no sense. I get that people are thinking well if someone finds this awesome game they will start telling people about and writing about it online and then it will just grow from there as more and more people are introduced to it and do the same promotion for you. And then maybe the big YouTubers and gaming sites will cover it and so forth.
On stores that have a guaranteed x number of people to see your game sure. That might actually happen. But I don’t think you should rely on it if only for the fact that it could change and all go away. Then what will you do?
And in other markets they don’t do that at all beyond listing it in new releases until it is bumped out a few hours or day later.
So basically the “build it and they will come” is just a dream. There is so much stuff out there and so much (more) stuff being released daily even if your game is great by the time someone thinks of telling someone else about it or writing about it online they will probably have encountered half a dozen more games and by that time forgot what they were going to do in the first place. And that is just for the people who would actually promote your game to begin with. Certainly you could expect a few mentions of it here and there buried out there somewhere on the Internet. But not enough to start a big movement.
So… you’re right. Making a great game is not the same thing as doing a great job at marketing a game. You want the combo of a great game that is very well marketed.
Who did you make the game for? Who is your audience? And don’t say “anyone and everyone!” or “people who like games” or “people who like very good games” because that is the same thing as saying “I made this for… absolutely nobody”.
Think about the people you made the game for. There is the answer for the best ways to market it.
Also don’t forget to do testing. Marketing is a science. One landing page (page your game is on) may do nothing to interest people and another may make them download it like crazy.
One thumbnail for your game may be completely missed or push people away. Another thumbnail may lead a huge number of people to your game’s page.
The only way to find out which is the best is to test. If people spent as much effort on this kind of stuff as they do on actually making the game… it’s probably make a big difference.
GarBenjamin,
I agree with what you are saying, but it’s general talk, i want something specific.
Who to advertise with? and who to market with, how much does it cost?
What you said is all over the internet, everyone is saying it, but no one gives specific information.
If it is all over the Internet with no specifics it is because of three reasons probably. First, is the specific tasks you will do to market a modern cartoony platform game are different from the specific tasks you will do to market a modern realistic military FPS game. Second, a lot of people probably don’t actually know and are just parroting what others have said/wrote. And finally third, the people who actually know probably also know if they come right out and spell it out there will be a flood of people spamming their games via marketing which ends up greatly reducing the effectiveness of all of marketing in those channels.
Anyway, the general actions you do are the same for anything.
Here is a list of action items pulled from the top of my head at this moment. Tomorrow, I might have made a different list but this is the one you get today:
Know who your target audience is
Research to learn where they hang out online (if you don’t already know)
Research to learn where they hang out offline (if you don’t already know)
Start reaching them.
Let’s say you made a mobile game about driving a truck and it also has zombies.
Who might like such a game?
People who like zombies seems reasonable.
People who like truck driving games (especially with a twist) seems reasonable.
So your job simply becomes to find out where the places are that have the highest concentrations of those two groups of people. Which magazines would they likely read? Which websites would they likely frequent? Etc.
That will take more research. Yes, it is work. But that is the only way I know of. There is no magic pill.
Once you complete that research you now know where your target audience is and that means you know how to reach them, right?
Some possible ways to reach them:
Participating in their communities
Purchasing ads directly on those websites
Writing a guest article on the websites
Submitting your game for review (if they actually do reviews on mobile games)
Anything else you can think of and find that you will only become aware of after doing your research
Basically for anything and everything there are already people out there who have direct access to the target audience. You leverage their assets to reach those people. For example, someone will have been smart enough to set up an email list of subscribers interested in zombie games and others will have done the same for truck driving games.
If you could get your message about your game sent out to those subscribers the response should be much more positive than if you simply randomly bug people who don’t give a darn about your game.
Also always keep an eye out for the community leaders. A leader is a person who has more clout than normal. This person can take your message and blast it out to thousands or even millions of other people. They are golden. It could be a video creator. It could be a person who does reviews on a popular website. Etc. You will find these “key” people in every community. If these people give your game the blessing the others will likely follow. On the other hand… if they don’t like it the community will likely follow that way as well.
That is the best that can be done without me actually doing the work for you and researching the target audience and so forth. When I said this is what you get today… the reason is because I have a lot of marketing info in my head and experience from many years of doing it. This stuff can be approached from different angles. The core remains the same… what is the most effective thing I can do today… how can I reach the largest number of targeted people (the people in your audience… your target market) with the least amount of effort and time? That question should guide your marketing every day IMO.
I highly appreciate your reply, you talked about specifics that narrow the search to the correct direction.
which is very hard to find now a days.
Mostly because if someone finds a good way to market or promote his own games, he will most likely keep it to himself as the common misconception is that we are all competitors!
I personally don’t really think that we are competitors. I believe each one will get his own share based on how good his game is, so i believe giving everyone a chance to promote or market his game and sharing the correct channels to do so, is something of good virtue that is rare to find!
The misconception that a real good marketing or promoting channel will be flooded if everyone knows about it, is not true.
These people live on promoting and marketing and they will take their sweet time with each one.
I am however still looking for more specifics. Even though games differ, still giving different marketing and promotion channels directly will save us tons of time.
For example, i promoted a game through such and such web site or business or publisher, and i got really good results.
What is wrong with that!
From the tons of blogs and articles I read on a daily basis, and have so for the past few years, this is what I would do for marketing…
Get together a list of youtubers who would be interested in covering your game. Look at games they’ve previously reviewed and see if they will be a good fit for yours. Don’t waste their time by spamming them with games they have no interest in. Send them an email with a link to your game. There are lots of articles on the internet on the do’s and don’ts of contacting youtubers. Read them. Approach those Youtubers with 1000+ subscribers. There are also services like Roostr (now owned by Chartboost) which hooks up games with Youtubers. Several similar services like this are popping up as well. If your game is really good with high production and fun values, it should be easy to get some free promotion. In many cases YouTubers will want cash to promote your game. Which YouTubers you spend cash on is up to you.
Hire a PR company for a couple of thousand $$$ to do a marketing and press push. While press is no longer the main channel for game promotion anymore, it could lead to your game being put in front of the right eyeballs which could end up in a prominent youtuber promoting your game, or it getting some good exposure.
Promote your game on Reddit in the relevant subreddits, but make sure you carefully follow Reddit’s self promotion rules.
Don’t forget organic marketing, make your game social. If you don’t have multiplayer or some sort of challenge feature that allows someone to invite and compete against their friends, you are facing an uphill battle from day one.
Great tips, will make sure to tryout one or two things.
How about going with a publisher? they do all the work and you wait for the money.
They take their cut and you take yours.
I have contacted few today and waiting for a reply.
If i don’t go with any, at least i will get a good vibe about my games.
Yes, games! not one game. I have around 6 great games that seen zero revenue and have been played by probably less than what you can count on both of your hands!
My most recent game took me around 4 months to make and two months to shape.
Will give results of my experience with both publishers and what Meltdown suggested.
Getting a publishing deal with a good publisher is very, very difficult. Good publishers only publish 3 or 4 games a year, and give each game months of dedicated marketing and resources to make your game the best it can be. They really invest in your game. But your game really has to be something special, which, is 1 in every 1000 games.
There are tons of ‘average’ publishers, they are more than happy to take your game, slap their name on it, and take a cut of any money it makes on the app store, while doing very little.
My advice, if working with a publisher, get exact figures on marketing spend as well as the number of resources (producers, QA etc) that will be assigned to your project. A publisher might have a fancy website offering the world and marketing, but unless they give you specifics that have been legally agreed upon, ‘marketing’ could be a simple press release to an email list, and that’s it.
Here is the rule of thumb…
If the publisher releases 3-4 games a year, you will get amazing value out of them as a publisher.
If the publisher releases 5 - 20, they will be good value as well.
If the publisher releases more than 20, even sometimes in the 100’s, don’t expect much out of this publisher.
