designxtek, may I be so bold as to ask what happened to the game's sales after you were no longer featured on the store? Have they stayed consistent at around 1k sales, or did they drop considerably to just a handful of sales per day, or maybe it's somewhere in-between? Or maybe sales grew?? PS I look forward to your next game.
Mike, I've seen your banner for Solitaire Siege. I'm not really into card games, so my advice is likely limited, but I do think there's a few things you can do to optimize clickthrough-rate and sales. I can't remember your banner off the top of my head, but if you think you might find it useful to post it here, I would be happy to give you some suggestions on some changes I think would boost the clicks. (I have a bit of a background in web marketing.)
I had my experiences with iTGB and automatically dropped it. It was a lot of headache trying to get the engine to work. So I switched to Unity. Great engine. You can build in C#, Java, etc The people on the forum there are very helpful.
It didn't stay consistent. There was a downhill slop of about 50 to 100 per day. Sometimes it would sustain over the course of a few days and drop. When you get featured it stays there for a month. I believe you have up to 4 pages of feature. So the first week is 1st page then 2nd page then 3rd etc But yeah just follow me on twitter as I will be announcing progress on the second game
Hi, Here's the current banner. I don't think it was the one I used on TA (I had to knock that banner up in under an hour as I was already paying for the advert). Any advice / comments are always welcome. I hope this is not against any forum rules. If it is, please take it down straight away. Thanks, Mike Moore.
Yeah, that seems to be the same experiance I have with it. Unity goes seem a much more solid platform to use just from the short amount of time I've had to play with it. Time to get the JAva books out and start learning to program again. At least I've got a couple of simple game designs to work towards. Thanks, Mike.
For that banner it looks really busy. Sometimes less is more. Try with more photo screen shots of your game. Capture interesting photos or maybe give the banner more of a background art. Use less text. People usually skim text. I weight photos more over text. Web users are usually good at ignoring banner ads. If it looks too much like one then they'll zip right over it. The best way to get a good idea of how effective a certain banner ad design can be is by going to different gaming sites and seeing which stands out. If you go to ign.com browse around on there and see how different banner ads impact you visually. Does it make you want to click through?
My app also got featured on iTunes last week. My sales increased a lot, and now it's the second week of being featured (now page 2). My sales have dropped to 1/5 of last week, but they are holding steady so far. Even though they dropped by 5 times, they are still higher than what my sales were before being featured. I will update you guys next week when my app will be on it's 3rd week in featured.
Congrats on getting featured. In the new iTunes9 it is harder to see new games coming out and featured games. Since the app store menu is at the top and usually people just click once to get to where they need to go. I was looking for your game in the featured section but it was only featured within the games section. I had to click and hold on the App Store tab and navigate down to games. It is really annoying setup.
Yeah, I know. I wish it was featured before iTunes 9 was released. I probably would have gotten a lot more exposure that way. Im not complaining though, I know how hard it is to get featured on iTunes in the first place!
my game was featured before itunes 9,but guess what, just 3 weeks,then itunes 9 came.then there was no such thing called "featured",so my sales drop from 50 to 2,one week later,apple got featured page back......
Hi Mike. Thanks for letting us analyze your banner, and hopefully some other developers might find my suggestions useful for their own advertising too. In no way am I saying these are the be-all and end-all rules; feel free to pick and choose which advice you want to incorporate. I definitely saw your banner before on here. Designxtek has already mentioned a lot of the things I would've said, but I'll try and expand a little more: 1) It's very full and busy. It's not like you haven't tried to get your money's worth, though! But it might be working against you. Most web users nowadays scan banner ads in fractions of a second, so you need to get them to look longer. Unconventionally, the best way to get visitors to stop and look is to make it as simple and clean as possible. That old adage still applies – Less is More. 2) You've tried to put some screenshots, but then overlaid a lot of text, which is never a good idea in banners. It works best to have one single feature; either one image or one single line of text, of just a few words. Having too much text and too many shapes in your banner ad, as you have, just overloads that fraction of a second the person looks at the banner and many are probably glossing over it. 3) You've made the game's title a prominent feature in the banner, with very large text and right in the middle. It may seem an obvious thing to do, but while it does give your game more brand recognition, showing them the name isn't enticing them to actually go and check it out. You don't actually need the title anywhere in your ad, and going with the, "less is more" approach, I would take it out. 4) Similar to the title, you've got the developer logo in there too. Generally it isn't going to do much unless you have a very established brand such as Gameloft or EA. But you can keep it there if you like, though I would make it about a third of its current size and put it right down in the corner. 5) You've got two quotes… they're pretty good quotes, but you should pick one of them. I'd lean more toward the, "Very creative twist on a classic solitaire game." as the other is a bit generic, and as sexist as it seems, 'AppGirl reviews' might be turning off some male customers from checking out the game, and I think that is your primary audience for this game. 6) I would recommend against screenshots unless you've got a really gorgeous-looking game. If you can get across the concept of the game without screenshots, that will make much more of a difference, because visitors will imagine the game in their head (and their imagination can live up to way more than anything we can show them in a screenshot) and they'll be curious to view how it looks and will hopefully interest more viewers to click through the banner. Piquing their interest with a little mystery is probably one of the most important tools to get them to stop and look at the banner a little longer. 7) It's a static ad. This might be a condition of adverts on TA but if it's not, animated banners can be very useful, and will stand out much more to viewers. It can be simple animation. I'll give a couple of examples how I would redesign the banner taking in my points above… [1] If you wanted to go the text route, you could, for example, ask a very simple question in the ad: "Solitaire? You've never seen it like this before…" against a completely black background. You could even add a small grenade leaning on the end of the sentence. If you wanted to add a little movement to the ad, I'd have the little grenade occasionally shaking, like it's close to bursting. [2] This one is a bit more visual. Similar to above, a black background, but this time nothing but a small playing card, ace of diamonds … then a fighter jet could come along and drop a bomb on it making it explode. Then you could fade into the, "Solitaire? You've never seen it like this before…" text, or you could even fade into the quote I picked earlier. This would work well for syndication because you could expand to a series of ads, with tanks shooting the playing card, or a soldier, etc. I can't be sure if these ideas would be appropriate for the game, you'll know better than me at that, but hopefully you've been inspired a bit. You don't need to take the ideas exactly. You could even go further and be really dramatic with a black banner with only a small grenade beside a playing card and nothing else but the App store logo. Mike, what I would suggest to you, if you can, is to create one or two banners now and then put these on different sites, as well as your older banner on a third site, and see what gets the biggest view:click ratio. That will allow you to optimize your hits to perfection. Anyway, I wish you the best of luck! And hopefully some others have found this useful to have started to see a contrast between what can sometimes make an ad stand out more from the crowd.
Hi Guys, Thanks for your comments. Very useful in deed, I knew it was a bit busy, but at the same time I wanted to get all the information in there, but I guess a bit of mystery may have done me more good for the clicks at least and Ive taken your suggestions on board for the next adverts. Right need to go look for an e-card Wedding Anniversary card for the wife Thanks again for your help and suggestions. All the best, Mike.
Hello, I know, I was amazed at that! I didnt expect to get a review on Touch Arcade, but boy, it has really helped the game jump up the charts. Its amazing how much power Touch Arcade seems to have. Ive also been told that Im on the What Were Playing on the US App Store, which Ill check it out tonight as my Internet connection is going really slowly at the moment. I really hope it keeps up for a while. To be honest, my wife wasnt really that happy with me when I told her that I was giving the game away for free on our wedding anniversary until I explained that one of the main reasons for doing the game was to try to help us to be together and if it wasnt going to happen, then I would sooner at least get a few people to try the game and enjoy it. Im just hoping that I will at least break even on what Ive paid out on everything to make the game (which has really dented my visa card =/ ) In the end, I think Ive made a fun little game, it was never going to set the world on fire, but it is a game that you will keep coming back to, to play again for a while in short bursts and hopefully after today, and the sudden jump in downloads, other people will think the same. Its now just a case of getting other people to buy it so I can clear my visa cards off and have any hope of moving to Canada. Thanks, Mike Moore. App Store Link: Solitaire Siege Game Page Follow me on Twitter
I hope the front page coverage turns out well for you. It is a tough market and also a new type of market. I am very excited to see where this new era of mobile gaming will go.
Thanks. I'm amazed at how low the sales are when you don't get coverage from the big sites. I wasn't expecting much, but 0-4 sales a day! I was at least expecting 10-20 sales a day. Solitaire Siege has really been a huge learning curve for me and I've actually altered what games I had planned on making / releasing next due to this experience. I don't think there's any way you could release a high AAA game on the iPod / iPhone now simply due to the expected selling price. Just looking at some of the comments I've seen about Solitaire Siege about not knowing if they should download it while it's currently free just totally baffled me and I don't know how you get around that kind of thinking. I've got a couple of games that I know will play really well, but may not sell that well, but should only take a couple of months to do and again I guess getting seen comes down to been featured on the big sites. So I may try me hand at a couple of really quick, funny little games and see how they do as the top sellers seem to be that style of game. I really don't like marketing and trying to push my goods into peoples faces, I'm a pretty shy person, so marketing goes against the grain with me. Just another thing to learn I guess. Sorry for rambling on there (it's getting late and I'm getting old) Thanks, Mike Moore. App Store Link: Solitaire Siege Game Page Follow me on Twitter
Well marketing is part of it. No matter how good your product is no one will know about it unless you put your word out there. Picture a boulevard full of shops with no windows. Thousands of people are walking up and down that street. You have the best shop in town. Your doors are closed. The guy across the street has his door open waving everyone in there. His shop isn't as great as yours but he has people walking in. But yeah with your game it is a niche market. I'm not really big on card games. I've had a handful of people requesting that I make a card game but it will only cater to a small number of people. But you can't satisfy everyone out there.
It's a credibility / exposure thing. Users have plenty of apps to choose from, free and paid. Why pick yours (or mine) if they've never heard of you? That's the reason why I'm doing 0-1 sales/day As soon as you're seen, it'll give people a reason to check you out.
I agree that it's definitely hard to get attention. Plus, you don't want to lose more money on ads than you make. I've been pretty conservative with Xeno Sola. I mean if you're only making $0.70 to $2.10 per game, the math is hard to justify an expensive ad campaign. Let's say you pay $300 for 300,000 impressions. Click-thrus tend to be sub-1% even when the ad is well targeted, in my experience. At 1% click-thru that's 3,000 visitors (or 10 cents a click, which is actually cheap). The next thing you need to factor is how many of those are going to buy the game. At $0.70, you'll need 430 sales to profit; at $1.4 you need 215; at $2.10 you need 143. That means in an ideal scenario you're going to need at least 5% of visitors to by your game at $3 or 15% of visitors at $1. That would have to be one darn convincing web page! Now one theory I tried was to put a game on sale (XS) and advertise in hopes that sales jump up enough to put the game in the top 100. For boardgames, I'm fairly sure this needs an average of at least 30 a day. Best sale day for me was 27 copies and I ended up falling short. The question stands: if I do a bigger campaign plus a sale, can I crack the top 100 again and see the boost?
