50% off and other strategies

Today you can purchase New Star Soccer 4 at half price. Check out www.gamedujour.com for more info.

It's been a while since I last blogged but I have been working really hard to try to get NSS4 out there and heard about. Sales are doing ok but there is definitely room for improvement and whilst the review from FourFourTwo was nice it hasn't had a massive impact. So I decided to start an advertising campaign through Google Ads. It's really easy to sign up and get your adverts going but actually understanding the statistics and results is altogether a different matter. At first I was bewildered by the amount of information available and struggled to make any sense of it. "CPC = 12 pence, is that good?" "CTR = 0.04%, what does this mean???" Without doubt the worst aspect of this learning period is that it feels like you are throwing money away. Initially the idea of spending over £100 per month seemed ludicrous to me, but as I looked into it more and started to understand the figures I realised that advertising is a necessary evil for New Star Games.  

Our website averages just over 1,200 visitors a day. Now if you take into account that we are selling around 10 games a day (just!) that’s a percentage of around 0.8%. I make around £10 per sale, so we can see that for Google Ads to be beneficial we need over 110 visitors for every £10 spent. I decided to test the water and spend £10 per day on an image campaign and see how it pans out. Initial reports show that the CPC is £0.06, so for my £10 I am getting approximately 160 clicks. That’s 160 new visitors to the site everyday. The problem here is that it is impossible to track how many of those visitors download and purchase the game. If it is just 1 a day then the ads pay for themselves but that's it. If it is 3 every 2 two days then the ad campaign is working and making money for New Star Games. It may be possible to see the real effects over time but for now I'm going to concentrate on getting the cost-per-click down and thus get more visitors for my 10 quid. Quite how I go about achieving this I’m not sure, but I'm learning as I go along here.

Another issue is that if I run the ads from midnight to midnight the £10 daily budget actually runs out by lunchtime and the ads will stop being served. I recently got an email from Google suggesting that I up the daily budget to £50 to maximise the number of clicks I get in a 24 hour period. £50 a day! They must be joking. That's £1500 per month and until I am convinced of the effectiveness of Google ads I won't be taking a plunge as deep as that! In the meantime I'm scheduling the ads to run from 9am till midnight to see how that affects things.  I mean, does it make any difference if someone visits the site in the early hours of the morning, during the day in the office, or after eating fish fingers for tea in the evening? As far as I can tell, a visit is a visit is a visit!

Of course, advertising is not the only way to get the game noticed. We still have some magazine reviews and cover-disc appearances to come which is great because it is free, but unlike the reviews of NSS3 it doesn't seem to be having a big impact this time around. Could world's financial situation be the main problem? One way of combatting that is through special offers, such as today's 50% off deal. Another way is to reach out to other countries by localising the game. Thanks to some dedicated fans, NSS4 is now playable in English, Italian, Dutch, Polish and Bulgarian, with more still to come.

Another idea I'm exploring is to create some free Flash mini-gamesand get them on as many Flash portals as possible to promote my download games. I'm quite excited by this strategy as some of the numbers I've heard of Flash game players is quite astonishing. You can see the early stages of my flash game campaign on the front page of www.newstargames.com. Once I start getting some portal appearances and player numbers I will report on them in the blog, so make sure you subscribe in a feed reader!