How I leaked $ 1000 to the promotion of the game and what came of it

Greetings, in this article I want to go over the most critical moment for any developer of mobile games, namely, on their promotion.

For many, the situation is familiar, did-did, but apart from friends, no one saw the game, but he tried so hard! Under the cut, there will be no vague wording or suggestions for promotion. Specifically, links - specifically the result. Go!

Coming close to the release, a sharp question arose in promoting the game. Even during the development, I set the bar for myself at $ 1000 , which I planned to unconditionally pour in. Alas, without investing, it’s almost impossible to get the proper audience, of course, there is a chance that you will be lucky, the stars will turn out and everything will turn out, but it does not always work out the way you want.

1) Publication of the article on w3bsit3-dns.com as part of the developer support project.

Omitting this thing will be just a crime. It's no secret that w3bsit3-dns.com is the heart of mobile games for the CIS countries. There are several packages that you can use, more details can be found on the following link .

For my game, I used the tariff plan "Complex". Of the advantages compared to others:

- Discount on future postings (10%)
- Banner support for Apps Promo (rotation) for 7 days
- Support on social networks (VK, Twitter, Facebook)

An important point: it is better to order 1.5-2 weeks before the release. In my case, 8 days have passed from order to publication (including weekends). Therefore, to get a push right from the first day, you need to order such things in advance and in the future just stipulate the publication date.

What is the results. According to the “Complex” tariff plan, the following figures should have been:

- Coverage = 280-310 thousand.
- Readings (unique) = 3-15 thousand.

I don’t know if it is correct to upload here the actual report on these figures, which was sent w3bsit3-dns.com in a couple of weeks , probably not, so I’ll just say that the coverage turned out to be a little less than predicted, and the readings turned out in the middle of the forecasted version.

Now, according to my impressions: immediately after the publication, the jump in installations, ratings, and, in fact, all the attendant things started. The game was released on November 25, November 30 was the publication of the article on w3bsit3-dns.com:



The publication was in the afternoon (somewhere at 15-16 hours) and the schedule immediately shows how the installations fell. The peak was 167 installations per hour. During the day the game scored 1,169 installations. If you compare with the first 5 days (50-150 installations on average). It turned out a very good increase.

Obvious pluses - after publication, many less popular resources began to write reviews on the game, someone just duplicated the article from w3bsit3-dns.com. In any case, all subsequent days of installations have become more:



Of course, not the golden mountains, but the start is given. These numbers were specifically with me, but with you they can be 2-3 times better, or possibly worse. It all depends on what game you will promote. Will I continue to try publishing on w3bsit3-dns.com? Undoubtedly, because, as I wrote above, it's silly to bypass this project of developer support.

2) Promotion through YouTUBE channels.

This method of promotion has become the main for me. It was possible to get the highest growth of installations from him (this does not mean that you need to use only it! Promotion is a huge integrated work where you need to use everything possible, because only in this way you can achieve the proper results). A huge plus is that the videos on YouTube are usually watched by interested people, so the final conversion is increased significantly.

I want to say that finding YouTube channels is not so simple. He included a player, went to YouTube and tried to search for the most accessible and interesting options through the search “top new games for Android / iOS”. Some, by the way, contacted the post office themselves and offered their own promotion options.

As promised, no water, here is a list of YouTUBE channels that I managed to find and with which I eventually collaborated:

- Game Day
- ¡Yes Droid!
- Ben Said
- PDAlife applications
- Game Plan
- Goodman
- Phone Planet
- Apple Theme
- Game Station
- KINATVIDEO
- Dietrich TV

It’s difficult to select the best channels. All did an excellent job in terms of price-quality ratio. Just in case, I’ll single out one channel:

- ¡Yes Droid!After publication (ordered 4th place in the top) there was a very large influx of installations from Mexico. Just a couple of days later, Google started screaming that “your application is gaining popularity! Urgently translate into Spanish. " Actually, the same thing was written by the players through the reviews.

Total: YouTUBE is a very cool platform for promoting games. The rollers will hang all the time, views a little but will increase and as a result, the exhaust from such orders will be held for more than one next month.

3) Promotion through social. the network

Initially, he planned to use targeted advertising on VKontakte, facebook, twitter and instagram.

- Vkontakte: well , a big plus of this social. Networking is the ability to target specific groups / communities. What I did was look for the most popular communities, see that they were less or less lively (posts should like, post, and of course views), and they just shoved them all into the target settings, so those people who watched my ad were subscribed to gaming communities and were thus interested in similar news. Here is the news with such settings I tried to promote on VKontakte:



The result was as follows:



Whether it is a lot or a little, it’s hard to say (there is nothing to compare with, few will share the successful method for free, unfortunately), therefore, I still tried another advertising news, but it showed even worse results. In general, I leaked $ 50 to this. After that I decided to stop, because ordering a video on YouTUBE will be much better.

- Facebook: I tried to make a small announcement before the release. Alas, due to the fact that Facebook does not have the opportunity to target specific groups / pages (as is done in VK), it turned out that there were thousands of views and almost zero clicks on the news itself. It turned out to be too difficult for me to set the target so that users were interested in the news, so this method was not used in promotion after the release.

- Instagram:probably by his stupidity decided to abandon the use of this network. I thought that on Instagram mostly people like zombies leaf through pictures and tap likes. You won’t get much more from them, but as one person said, he managed to get good results (the news was made with the Download button). Perhaps it was worth a try, but it’s too late, at least with the current game I will not do this.

- Twitter: this social. the network and without ads showed good results. I published various tweets with screenshots from the game and always indicated hashtags, the best one for myself was the following hashtag sheet:

# unity3d #mobilegame #games #indiedev #indiegame #gamedev #development #lowpoly #android #iOS #newgames #arcade

With him, tweets received 5-10-20 retweets, and as a result, audience reach increased significantly.



Everywhere where there were jumps in views, there were publications. Of course it is difficult to say how many installations I received from them (and whether I received them at all), but let's be frank - the more people see, learn about the game - the more installations there will be in the end.

Total social Networks take place as part of a comprehensive promotion of the game. Of course, their result is not high, but in any case it is, and since it is, then it must not be missed.

4) Attempts to declare a game on large resources.

If there is absolutely no money for promotion, do not despair, you can always catch your luck by writing forms through Contact Us on various large resources on mobile games. Who knows, maybe you are lucky and they want to review your game.

I give you the royal link to Google Docs, Click ME! , which lists a huge list of foreign resources on mobile games. Some of them will ask for payment, while others may agree to do a free review. While I sent about ten letters for the test, the answer is zero, but maybe the reason is in my game, I will try further, the list is very extensive, sooner or later someone will agree to help!

Regarding the Russian-speaking audience, here the database on the promotion of mobile games helped me a lot. Unfortunately, there is no open access to it, as is the case with the English-language analogue, but getting it is quite simple, there are several options (tell about your experience of promotion, share links or repost in social networks). The link was issued on the same day, so I highly recommend getting it. There is a fairly extensive list, in any case, something will be useful to you!

As a result, boldly run through the list of the two above links, there are forums and websites and YouTube channels, write to everyone and everything. The more people learn about the game, the better!

Summary

What ultimately happened. Now the number of installations averages 1000-1500 per day.



Sometimes there are surges of up to 2000 installations, but this is rare. In 25 days, we managed to get closer to the mark of 30k installations. The figure seems to be not bad, but because At present, the CIS countries dominate the game, the income from the game is rather modest. On advertising (Unity Ads) I managed to get almost $ 100.



In-game purchases, while there were $ 67. That sums up a slight laugh :)
It’s hard to predict how the game will behave in the future, it will be 30 days from the release date, as a result, the game will drop out of the “top new free games” and presumably the settings will go down the same way. Time will already show here.

These are the results. In fact, it poured $ 950. I got about 30k of exhaust emissions (I think in 5 days I will reach exactly 30k).

As for me, enough to be afraid to share my promotion methods, I really had to spend a lot of time to find all the above resources. Very often I came across recommendations from the category: “I used YouTube, a bunch of forums, well, you use it!”, And which ones you used, how you used it, they are silent everywhere. I understand that having achieved very good results, such information will be worth its weight in gold, but you need to remember that life is arranged in such a way that the more you give, the more you get. So, share your links, together we can finally curb all the delights of promoting mobile games.