People tend to keep this stuff to themselves, but I’m not really sure why, unless you are WPP or Saatchi and Saatchi, worried about the competition…
Anyway, I’ve been running a few ads since the launch of GTB. The game is on big name portals such as steam, which is where it gets a lot of visibility, but I don’t think there is any harm in promoting the games website direct, my company, and the idea of direct sales.
My ad campaign has been fairly low key so far. I have exclusively used google adwords as my ad provider in this case (I’ve used other companies for other campaigns, but adwords seems to be a good ROI).
The ads have been running for 4 days so far and the stats are:
446,851 impressions
901 clicks
Average cost per click: £0.15.
Traffic bounce rate: 71%
Ave visit duration: 25 seconds. (vs 1 min 09 for all traffic)
Interestingly that makes for a cost per thousand impressions (CPM) of £0.30.
Even given MUCH better quality traffic, that’s why I laugh at the CPM prices quoted by many big name sites.
I can’t help thinking that the scale of my ad campaign is laughably small so far (I might double it right now…) and that the average visit duration is really low. Roughly 10% of my adword-sourced visitors spend >60 seconds on my site, which I consider to be a fairly good quality visitor. That means £1.50 to get a good visitor that way, which seems pretty poor, if you consider they still might not buy the game (although they may still mention it to others, or buy it later).
However, comparing it with 2 other recent ad campaigns shows me that adwords certainly beats them, in terms of price-for-quality-visitor.
I’m definitely going to go double my daily ad spend…