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[Jacob_]

Has anyone ever advertised a game on Facebook? It seems ideal to me since my game is kind of specialized and hard to advertise without heavily targeted ads or spending a lot of money. I've heard criticism of their program before, but not in the context of advertising a game.

[agersant]

I can't find the thread anymore but someone around here used it to promote his trading card game (similar to Magic: The Gathering I think) and found it very efficient.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i haven't used my own money on it, but i used facebook ad credit on it once just to test it out. from what i remember, it was basically similar to google ads in that it didn't make anywhere near as much money back as went into it. 100$ for like 200-300 clicks or whatever just doesn't work in the context of games, where the conversion rate is about 1% if you're lucky. so basically that's 100$ for 2-3 sales on average

i'd recommend to those who want to try these that they don't use their own money, but instead use those free introductory credit coupons that are everywhere. and that they measure the results; if possible make a landing page specific to that ad, so you can precisely know how many of the people who bought the game found it through that ad. easiest way to do that is just create a duplicate copy of the buy page that is identical in all ways except for some identifier to show that sales from that page came from the ad and sales from the normal buy page didn't come from the ad

generally google ads and facebook ads and advertising in general only works if what you are selling as a very high conversion rate (clicks to purchases ratio) or a very high price (such as if you're selling $300+ products)

[MooseMouse]

I used Facebook ads in mid 2011 to advertise my Facebook game. It was a Flash 3d, multiplayer car racing game. I was never able to make it cost effective, but I can not be sure if that was the fault of the advertising cost or the game itself. I had a decent conversion rate of ads to new players, but a terrible conversion rate of players to microtransaction revenue.

I was pretty happy with the level of ad targeting. The big problem was that advertising to people in the U.S. and Western Europe was very expensive.. about $1 per click at the time. But advertising to people in South America, and Eastern Europe was pretty cheap. So I ended up using Facebook ads primarily to fill the multiplayer lobbies with players from the latter countries.

The thing that would be needed to make Facebook advertising work is a decent viral k-factor. If you can convince a player acquired via Facebook ads to recruit X number of friends it can work.. I think (I was never able to do this). You also should consider the lifetime value of a player and how you may be able to make money by directing him to your other games. So it may take awhile for ads to pay off.

[UrbanwarfareStudios]

Is it worth pointing out the value of social media as a form of advertising?

My game is very niche so I am advertising the actual progress of the project to a growing group of 700+ likes, and I'm really pleased with the results. Once I have a few 1000 likes I am considering spending a few test 10$-20$ 3 day advertisements to see whether I benefit from the likes it produces.

I suppose I'm different because I want as many fans ready for launching the project on kickstarter so I suppose it depends what stage your game is at as to whether you can use these sort of techniques to generate income? Just thought I share my experience

[GeoffW]

I can't find the thread anymore but someone around here used it to promote his trading card game (similar to Magic: The Gathering I think) and found it very efficient.

That would be me, and you can find my DevLog here.  I can't say Facebook advertising has been 'very efficient', because it looks like hits from Facebook may be converting into sales at a lower rate than other sources of traffic to my site.  It's actually quite hard to connect sales to their source, unlike hits and demo downloads which I can measure quite accurately.

If you get a free coupon I definitely recommend you use it.  Bid lower than the recommended levels, as it's better to have a few hits per day that make a profit than hundreds of hits which cost you on average!  Also pay a lot of attention to which regions you're advertising in as well as the message itself, and remember that conversions are your goal, not click through rate (which is Facebook's goal).

I should probably write another post about this stuff on the DevLog!

if possible make a landing page specific to that ad, so you can precisely know how many of the people who bought the game found it through that ad.

Alternatively you can specify ?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=[whatever you like] on the end of your URL.  Then you should be able to identify this traffic in Google Analytics.

[Chris Polus]

Uuuh that's really an interesting thread as I always thought putting money into ads like on Facebook would really be stupid, but I hear it worked for some, at least to some extent. I'll definitely try and check out the free credits to test it. Thanks for the hint!

Having to market our game at some point these tips will come in really handy.

[Jacob_]

Some things I should have pointed out: My game is free to play and browser based, so it probably lends itself better to social marketing. (I just edited my sig to include the link, although there isn't much to see yet.) Conversions aren't as much of an issue as for some games since all of the income is from banner ads. However, since it's a sandbox sort of game, its success depends on having a lot of registered players.

Does anyone know where to get those coupon codes? I couldn't find any that weren't expired.

[GeoffW]

Conversions aren't as much of an issue as for some games since all of the income is from banner ads.

Then your conversions are banner ad views or clicks or whatever you get income from.  For example if I go play your game all the way through over several sittings, you probably make much more money than if I only played for 10 seconds.

Does anyone know where to get those coupon codes? I couldn't find any that weren't expired.

I just ran a Facebook page for a few months and they sent me one.

[cliffski]

I've used almost every advertising network in existence.
I tried facebook but it was very very poor in terms of generating any interested traffic. It was quite a surprise, because you'd assume their demographic targeting would be especially good, but it turns out just using google adwords or other sites and picking specific sites to run banner ads on is just as targeted, and a lot cheaper.

[Mctittles]

I have used facebook advertising for web sites in the past (although not game related), and found the direct response pretty poor.
I did notice that after I advertised for a month, the next month I had increased sales.  This of course cannot be assumed to be directly related, but you should keep in mind that advertising is a lot about just getting people to know your name.  People are generally more likely to buy from a company they are aware of then someone they have never heard of before.

[Muz]

i haven't used my own money on it, but i used facebook ad credit on it once just to test it out. from what i remember, it was basically similar to google ads in that it didn't make anywhere near as much money back as went into it. 100$ for like 200-300 clicks or whatever just doesn't work in the context of games, where the conversion rate is about 1% if you're lucky. so basically that's 100$ for 2-3 sales on average

I thought the whole idea behind Facebook ads were that they could be very targeted and have a high conversion rate. Like you could go for people who have played [similar game] or males in a certain age bracket.

IMO, Facebook is far too overrated recently, so the prices are now too high.

[Chris Polus]

I thought the whole idea behind Facebook ads were that they could be very targeted and have a high conversion rate. Like you could go for people who have played [similar game] or males in a certain age bracket.

I also thought that was the idea. But it seems Facebook struggles to keep that promise and make advertising on their platform worthwhile, which is why their stock price probably also lost 50% as they can't show how to grow in users / significantly increase their revenue / or improve their advertising efficiency in the mobile space...