My development group and I just redid this game, and we are looking to try getting it popular again.
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.