So far I have not been able to resolve the bug to put ads on Facebook. This could be a China to USA problem. Not a big problem because I am getting reasonable results with Google ads. Everything I am doing so far is testing the results with small amounts of money to fine tune the ad and see if the game I select is able to keep the players coming back. Most of my past experience has shown me the right ad can bring people to your door then it is up to the product to bring in the cash. We have finished a few more games that we feel are good and will launch them and use the game we are advertising to help promote the new games and get more bang for the buck. We did not do this so far so it will be interesting to see the results. When you use advertising what is the step by step procedure you use to test the waters before you invest your budgeted amount and what are you looking to get from the ads
Really depends on the platform. Right now we run various campaigns for Facebook, web and iPad acquisition. Our monthly spent for Facebook + Web is up to 300k/month and we just soft-launched our most popular game on iPads (iPhone coming soon) where I allocated budget of 1M for a first 6 weeks of global launch (coming in 4-6 weeks). For example on Facebook, the thing goes like this: 1, We run around 100 new campaigns a day with budgets up to 20 . There are another 100-200 campaigns running with higher budgets. Every new campaign has a day or two to prove itself worth - we check CTR, CPI, frequency and the most importantly ROI. After a week we can determine whether the campaign will pay for itself in the longterm - we usually want our campaigns to be paid off in 90 days. So if there is a campaign with high CTR, low frequency and CPI which is lower than our LTV, we keep it running for a while. In a week or two we see a trend of paying users and retention in our internal stats and also a prediction of how many days it will take to get the campaign paid off. Then we further increase the budget and scale the campaign or kill it. For every targeting option we run a separate campaign. For example TS M 1825 Custom [US, iPads] is a campaign for TrainStation targeting Males between age 18-25 based on a Custom Audience file exported from our database (basically our own existing players that play a Facebook version of the game) in US which use Facebook on iPad. Or another example could be TS M 25+ [UK, TTD, Payers] which targets male players of TrainStation above 25 from UK who likes Transport Tycoon Deluxe and actually paid for something on Facebook with their credit card in the last 7 days. This is a benefit of a partnership with Facebook - you can use extended targeting options and ad formats which are not available for other advertisers. And also each campaign is then tested for a various placements varying from the News Feed to Right Hand Side or Video ad.
I really appreciate your information. It is by far the best I got so far. If your company was publishing a free game and you wanted to test it how much money would you spend per day and how many days would you run that test? And which company/s would you advertise with? Then once you had your results and you decided it was a go how much money would you spend per day and for how many days to launch it? This may be an unfair question because you could also use your existing games to push ads to promote the game. Once again I really appreciate your being so upfront and hope one day there is a way I can repay you for that.
