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[PompiPompi]

Ok, so I have bought 100k impressions(for 200$) for an ad at game zebo for 1 month.
My campaign isn't over yet, but it's getting close, and here are the results.
84,078 Total Impressions
85 Total Clicks
0.10% Average CTR

Sales? 0, nill, nada.
I know this because I didn't have any sales this month at all. I usually don't get any sales unless my game is exposed, such as the front page of the portal.

Just for reference, this is the ad:

[ink.inc]

The only advertisement I listen to is word of mouth. 

I've never clicked on an ad. Ever. For anything.

[moi]

thanks for sharing, here are my opinions:
-ad picture looks very bad, I mean it doesn't even look like a game or anything identificable, this is your major problem right here
-did you get any visits at all? you should track that too

[William Broom]

Personally I would be quite intrigued by that ad picture, but moi may be right in that most people need some sort of indication that it is game, and what kind of features it has.

[Radix]

Yeah, you haven't got anything in your ad at all, it's just a graphic and a name. Any kind of tag line or text would be an improvement.
You can't expect people to just blindly click on your picture because its on their screen. A good chunk of that 85 you have were probably mis-clicks, cause a CTR of 0.1% is potentially just noise.

Secondly you lack a call to action. You need to say, click here! Why? I don't really know but it works and there's a reason everyone else has it. I guess you're either indicating that there's some kind of payoff, or simply planting the option of clicking.

Thirdly, $2 per mille kind of sucks when you're starting out. It's okay for a big graphic but as you've just learned, if you don't use your ads effectively that's two hundred blown bones.

General advice for people using web advertising: split test. Make at least two versions of your ad and run them for a decent chunk of impressions (the more you can get in a short time window for reasonable expense the better) and compare their performance. Discard the worst-performing ads and look at the successful one, think about what made it successful, and create at least two variants based on that. Rince and repeat until you've evolved your ad up to a conversion rate you're happy with. While you're doing this keep in mind that what makes an ad effective in one place might not work so well when it appears elsewhere, so split test separately for each service etc you're using.

As a benchmark, iirc a good CTR is something like 1%-2.5%, although it can be much higher if your ad rocks, and conversion rates (sales) tend to be 2.5%-5% of that, although again it can of course be much higher if you're effectively filtering people interested in your thing (in which case, that is if your conversion rate is awesome, consider cost-per-action ads instead of CPM if you can and then crank up the exposure). There are a lot of factors here and I'm only speaking from memory so these numbers are just for conservative estimates.

[PompiPompi]

I must admit, I didn't put much effort in the ad. It's basically the title artwork of the game. Ironically, I didn't want to invest time and money in the ad itself.
However, do consider this ad appears in a website called GameZebo, it's a website for games. All the ads there are for games, so it's kind of common to see there ads with only the a picture and the title of the game, sometimes a picture only ad.
I think I will try to ask the site owners what they think of the ad performance, they are pretty approachable.

[TeeGee]

Well, also note that GameZebo is a website for casual gamers. Most of their audience consists of grannies playing the latest HO game from BigFish. Your game is an action rpg. DIfferent target audience altogether.

[Radix]

All the ads there are for games, so it's kind of common to see there ads with only the a picture and the title of the game, sometimes a picture only ad.

That just means that you aren't the only person throwing money away.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

yeah, what others said -- i guess you'd call this 'programmer advertising' (analogy to programmer art), e.g. it's when someone who knows absolutely nothing about a field attempts to do something in that field. the results are what you'd expect from that. instead, what you should have done is found a few people with degrees in marketing or even someone who has taken a class in advertising and got their opinion on the ad before you spent the $200. a lot of what they teach in advertising class is kind of inapplicable to indie games because they're focused on big corporate ads, but the basic principles should be consistent and applicable.

[Radix]

Well, finding a friend with a degree and then trying to determine whether they actually know anything about web advertising is one thing I guess, but there's a lot of information on the web and you could probably get a pretty decent education on the specific types of ads you want to run with a day or two of reading.
Only trouble is this info is gonna mainly be available on sites relating to SEO shit, that is, the slimiest and most wretched hive of scum and villainy on the tubes.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

that's probably better than nothing, but i'm not sure that'd be enough -- like, let's say a programmer spent a few days reading art tutorials before they made the graphics to their game. it'd still suck when compared to art done by a real artist, although it'd suck much much less.

[mankoon]

It must be frustrating to put out an ad and get no sales from it. Business is a learning game.

I've actually seen this ad on some sites but I can't remember where[edit: it's in the title of the thread]. I did not click it sorry to say. It was more of a " oh, hey it's that game!". The ad was a reminder of your game but perhaps it should have said something more insightful. It should say something about a sale or some other point of interest.

[jwk5]

Your style is nice, real colorful and crisp, it is the arrangement and balance in the image that is bad. There are a lot of things to consider when making an ad image but I can give you a few basic ideas based on the one you posted.


If you blur your add image really well you can see that the most potent color groups in the image aren't the text and the girl's defining features (which should be the focus of the add) but instead it is the green of the ball, the orange of the hat, and the bright lighting on her face. This is largely due to saturation and hue contrasting (highly saturated colors against dull colors and orange over its blue complement). It is really important that you manage your hue (the spectrum color) and saturation (the color intensity) levels so that the most important aspects of your image give off the greatest degree of contrast. It is also best to try for some sort of color harmony (researching color theory will pay off there), a random mishmash of color really creates a lot of visual chaos.


The next issue is the values (black, white, and the grays in between). If you desaturate the image you can see there is no real balance in value, rather than nice defined blocks of lights and darks you've kind of got this swirl of contrasts that really makes it hard to pick out any visual landmarks. This is especially bad for advertising because this means nothing in the ad is jumping out at the viewer and grabbing their attention.


If you up the contrast and brightness you can see that although the words are now a little more readable you have hard lines going every which way, there is no real flow. Rather than a nice contour leading the viewer to the point of the advertisement it is more like a maze, and when you've only got a brief glance's worth of time to snare your viewer's attention that is a very bad thing.


This last image here insn't a fantastic example, but hopefully you get the gist of it. You can see how careful value balance has allowed me to control which elements of the picture stand out the most (in a sort of visual hierarchy). Color saturation and warmth balances in a similar manner. I've used the dark "letter box" bordering to sort of corral the viewer's attention and narrow the focus to the girl and the text and to help the edge flow. There are lots of other things you do, even just a little bit of research will go a long ways, but hopefully this at least gives you an idea of where to start.

[umezono]

Well, finding a friend with a degree and then trying to determine whether they actually know anything about web advertising is one thing I guess, but there's a lot of information on the web and you could probably get a pretty decent education on the specific types of ads you want to run with a day or two of reading.
Only trouble is this info is gonna mainly be available on sites relating to SEO shit, that is, the slimiest and most wretched hive of scum and villainy on the tubes.

boy, you really have it out for them.

[davidp]

Your style is nice, real colorful and crisp, it is the arrangement and balance in the image that is bad. There are a lot of things to consider when making an ad image but I can give you a few basic ideas based on the one you posted.


If you blur your add image really well you can see that the most potent color groups in the image aren't the text and the girl's defining features (which should be the focus of the add) but instead it is the green of the ball, the orange of the hat, and the bright lighting on her face. This is largely due to saturation and hue contrasting (highly saturated colors against dull colors and orange over its blue complement). It is really important that you manage your hue (the spectrum color) and saturation (the color intensity) levels so that the most important aspects of your image give off the greatest degree of contrast. It is also best to try for some sort of color harmony (researching color theory will pay off there), a random mishmash of color really creates a lot of visual chaos.


The next issue is the values (black, white, and the grays in between). If you desaturate the image you can see there is no real balance in value, rather than nice defined blocks of lights and darks you've kind of got this swirl of contrasts that really makes it hard to pick out any visual landmarks. This is especially bad for advertising because this means nothing in the ad is jumping out at the viewer and grabbing their attention.


If you up the contrast and brightness you can see that although the words are now a little more readable you have hard lines going every which way, there is no real flow. Rather than a nice contour leading the viewer to the point of the advertisement it is more like a maze, and when you've only got a brief glance's worth of time to snare your viewer's attention that is a very bad thing.


This last image here insn't a fantastic example, but hopefully you get the gist of it. You can see how careful value balance has allowed me to control which elements of the picture stand out the most (in a sort of visual hierarchy). Color saturation and warmth balances in a similar manner. I've used the dark "letter box" bordering to sort of corral the viewer's attention and narrow the focus to the girl and the text and to help the edge flow. There are lots of other things you do, even just a little bit of research will go a long ways, but hopefully this at least gives you an idea of where to start.

whoa, i never thought colors can make such a difference, this is going into my bookmarks!

[Radix]

that's probably better than nothing, but i'm not sure that'd be enough -- like, let's say a programmer spent a few days reading art tutorials before they made the graphics to their game. it'd still suck when compared to art done by a real artist, although it'd suck much much less.

Yeah this is a bullshit analogy, Paul.