Since November 7, I have been running different types of sponsors for varying amounts, to different degrees of success.
The most successful we’ve had was search experiences (aka keyword sponsors), where you will attach the sponsored game to coming up in results a player may look for, like “military tycoon,” “tanks,” etc.
In the below video, you can see that any sponsors we’ve ran with a relatively high CTR and playrate, were all search experience sponsors. Ones with less than 1% CTR and playrates, were regular sponsors:
Search experience ads gave us more stable CCU (hanging around 50-90 CCU typically, with a daily budget of 20-25 ad credits), though the peak CCUs would be low (if at all), and I assume that we don’t get as much reach with them as with normal sponsors.
With normal sponsors, we obviously reach more people (just look at the impressions!) but that doesn’t seem to matter, given the abysmal CTR and playrates; all lower than search experiences. We would get very high CCU peaks, of like 150-200+ sometimes, but they would not be held for very long.
I am leaning towards going all out in search experiences for my game’s advertising, which I plan to do one last big push of advertising around Thanksgiving (November 28), but I want to know what others here think.
Search experiences by far were more successful for the game, both in CTR, play rate, and overall CCU/game performance.
A regular sponsor would get way more impressions, but the CTR and play rates were abysmal.
Search experiences have given me some of the highest CTR I’ve ever seen - one time I had 10-15% from them, and almost 10% play rate.
Oh wow, thats really good. Did u experiment with using more tags vs less tags? Or which tags work the best? For the game i want to release its starting from 0 so it might be difficult to grow the game.
How much credits did you put in each day if you dont mind me asking?
Since my game is a military game, usually the tags I put in are anything related to military, and I’ll even put competing game names in the tags, like “military tycoon,” “war tycoon,” etc.
You should try to get your expected audience to the millions figure, as seen below
Thanks a ton man! Last time i tested it, it only ended up using 6 credits / 150 for the day. I guess ill need to do what u said and look for a wider target audience.
thanks for sharing this its great help! iv been having trouble with this new ads manager for a long time and kinda just gave up. congrads on ur game doing well! il try this new search method in a few days when my credits are back up! my game already has 300k plays. it skyrocketed during a while without me even sponsoring it. then it dropped over a month to about 800 players a day. i see in my Acquisition that abt 6000 people in the last month has found my game in search. so maybe sponsoring search would help me out.
i also have 152,790 players from Home Recommendation in the past 30 days. so im unsure what i should do
