Facebook Gaming Campaign (20)
Hi guys,
Well after a bad start, too many campaigns running on different niches (thanks Mr. Green!) I've decided to start a Follow Along Campaign so I can see what I am doing right and what I am doing wrong.
I'm starting out slowly on Facebook with a Gaming Ad for a MMO game which pays 1.60 (Euro) CPA.
My Facebook targeting is as follows :-
880,000 people
who live in the United Kingdom
exactly 21 years old and younger
who are male
who like #Batman: Arkham City, #Batman: Arkham Asylum, #Hulk (comics), #Assassin's Creed II, #Marvel Comics, #DC Universe Online, #Avengers (comics), #The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, #World of Warcraft, #Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, #Spider-Man, #Online game, #Massively multiplayer online role-playing game, #Call of Duty 3, #Superman, #Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, #Batman, #Marvel: Avengers Alliance, #Call of Duty: Black Ops II, #Batman: Arkham Origins, world warcraft cataclysm or world warcraft wrath lich king
on Right column on desktop computers
who are in one of the broad categories Gaming (social/online), Console Gaming, Action/Adventure Film, Science Fiction/Fantasy Films or Console Gamers
and my bid per CPC is 0.20 in a suggested range of 0.16-0.24
My results so far (campaign running just short of a day) are -
Campaign reach?
18,528
Frequency?
3.0
Clicks?
19
Click-Through Rate?
0.035%
Total Spent?
£3.25
No Conversions.
I will be adding to my targeting today through finding a report on the games demographic and adding more ads as I go (I have two going at minute)
I'll keep everyone up to date.
Ok so I've added another ad to the campaign and tweaked the targeting, it now looks like ;
This advert targets 1,400,000 people:
who live in the United Kingdom
exactly between the ages of 16 and 26 inclusive
who are male
who like #Batman: Arkham City, #Batman: Arkham Asylum, #Hulk (comics), #Assassin's Creed II, #Marvel Comics, #DC Universe Online, #Avengers (comics), #The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, #Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, #World of Warcraft, #Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, #Spider-Man, #Aion: The Tower of Eternity, #Online game, #Call of Duty, #Final Fantasy, #Massively multiplayer online role-playing game, #Call of Duty 3, #Call of Duty: Black Ops, #Battlefield (series), #Captain America: The First Avenger, #Superman, #Assassin's Creed (video game), #Battlefield: Bad Company 2, world warcraft cataclysm, #StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, #Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, #Batman, world warcraft wrath lich king, #StarCraft (series), #StarCraft, call duty world at war, #Marvel: Avengers Alliance, #Call of Duty: Black Ops II or #Batman: Arkham Origins
on Right column on desktop computers
who are in one of the broad categories Gaming (social/online), Console Gaming, Action/Adventure Film, Science Fiction/Fantasy Films or Console Gamers
Suggested bid: £0.15–0.31 GBP
for one ad and this:
This advert targets 2,400,000 people:
who live in the United Kingdom
exactly 27 years old and younger
who like #Batman: Arkham City, #Batman: Arkham Asylum, #Hulk (comics), #Assassin's Creed II, #Marvel Comics, #DC Universe Online, #Avengers (comics), #The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, #Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, #World of Warcraft, #Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, #Spider-Man, #Aion: The Tower of Eternity, #Online game, #Call of Duty, #Final Fantasy, #Massively multiplayer online role-playing game, #Call of Duty 3, #Call of Duty: Black Ops, #Battlefield (series), #Captain America: The First Avenger, #Superman, #Assassin's Creed (video game), #Battlefield: Bad Company 2, world warcraft cataclysm, #StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, #Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, #Batman, world warcraft wrath lich king, #StarCraft (series), #StarCraft, call duty world at war, #Marvel: Avengers Alliance, #Call of Duty: Black Ops II or #Batman: Arkham Origins
on Right column on desktop computers
who are in one of the broad categories Gaming (social/online), Console Gaming, Action/Adventure Film, Science Fiction/Fantasy Films or Console Gamers
Suggested bid: £0.15–0.29 GBP
for the other two.
Bigger markets and added female to the demographic.
Stats wise so far :
Campaign reach?
52,354
Frequency?
2.8
Clicks?
43
Click-Through Rate?
0.030%
Total Spent?
£6.57
Anyone any thoughts at this early stage?
yeah what did Mr Green edit out? 
Firstly, well done on starting a follow-along!
I'd definitely recommend testing a lot more ads - at least 10 or so to begin with. Job #1 is finding images that people are interested in and will click on.
Are you running a tracking program (Prosper, CPVLab, etc)? If not, I'd strongly recommend getting one set up ASAP.
Haha I edited the title, it was too broad before!
He set me straight for sure!!
Though I think i've hit a major hurdle. I was getting quite a few clicks but no conversions which got my curious mind wondering what was happening. So I viewed my ad in the right column and clicked it. It took me to a completely different landing page to the one shown with my Network, a page saying the game is not available in my country, though it is a UK and Ireland campaign.
I've emailed the Network to find out what is going on.
Tracking is next, though these are direct link ads, can I still do tracking?
I'm properly annoyed now having looked at other offers on the Network, the link just doesn't work! Wasted time, effort and money with no hope of success!!!
Lesson painfully learnt!
1. Networks more often than not redirect people elsewhere when not in countries the offer pays out for. Load your affiliate link via a UK/Ireland proxy before jumping to conclusions.
2. A $0.20 bid is quite low. You might receive crappy traffic.
3. Your age brackets are far too large. 13-27 and 16-26 covers a massively different set of people. A 13 year old tween has a different gaming mindset to a 25 year old who may have a degree and steady employment.
4. I would advise not mixing precise interests and broad categories together. Some of them are not particularly relevant anyway. E.g. Action/Sci-Fi films.
5. I think your interest targets are off the mark. An MMO is a very different genre of game to FPS like the CoD series and Battlefield. From memory, I have found audiences defined by these types of interests always responded poorly to MMO ads. Starcraft, Assassins Creed, CoD, MW2, Battlefied, #online game, are together going to give you a massive audience that is not niche at all. Focus on actual MMOs:
World or Warcraft and related expansions/sites - note large audience, but I have typically seen crap CTRs.
Guild Wars, Aion, Rift, Defiance, Lineage I/II, Metin, Fiesta, Dofus, Tibia, Atlantica Online, Cabal, Age of Conan, Dragonica, Drakensang, EVE online, Flyff, Ragnarok, RF Online, Runes of Magic, Silkroad, SWTOR, Tabula Rasa, TERA, Wakfu, RuneScape, MapleStory, DDTank, Knight Online, etc.
MMO-related Gaming companies/devs/portals: gpotato, perfect world, game321, aeria games, ChangYou, Gravity Interactive, Nexon, Kongregate, GameFuse, NCSoft, Outspark, Trion, Ankama, ArenaNet, etc.
General crap like MMORPG, Massively multiplayer online blah blah.
6. Give some more info e.g. offer and post some ad screenshots for feedback. Someone may already have experience with the offer and could provide insight.
another tip I said b4 :
- take that campaign and replicate it 40 x or more (not sure on your budget ) for different countries etc etc
- take the time to find offers for those countries and demographics etc...
- set the budgets low on the new campaigns (maybe not 40 to start but 10 )
- run them all....... find the winner int erms of 'most potential ' & then focus there..
I have access to self serve bidding trends and 1 of the biggest mistakes Spenders make is focusing on 1 thing and
not Split Testing the adserving & competition on the self serve..
my 0.02cents ..
Red Alliance
Originally Posted by ratalliance
I remember thinking that his pace was spastic, and I didn't see the approach being applicable until I had a proven winner tied down in a single, small(er) niche. Never considered split-testing countries.
It makes a lot of sense. I may need to tweak my testing protocol a bit...
- yeah most affiliates "fall in love " with their 1 or 2 or 3 campaigns.....
- if u think of the cash versus the love affair then you make moves like replicating the campaign X times
in different countries, with different offers, blah blah...
- then when you "launch " you get LOTS of data...
- that is how you find out where the pockets of cash are on that specific traffic source.......... example: you might find Brazil dating (with similar campaign demographics ) converts 30% ROI versus USA -10% ROI .... then you focus on Brazil versus USA or whatever
OK a quick update.
My traffic was going to a dead link, had my affiliate manager confirm it today with an apology. So all that traffic was wasted but got to move forwards. Been suggested I try another new MMO game so going to jump back into the fray taking onboard the points above. Just to clarify, I'm sticking to the UK at minute as this is my first foray and taking it slowly to start.
Here are the stats:
This advert targets 420,000 people:
who live in the United Kingdom
exactly between the ages of 18 and 21 inclusive
who are male
who like #Batman: Arkham City, runescape, #Batman: Arkham Asylum, silkroad, world warcraft, #DC Universe Online, flyff, runes magic, #The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, #World of Warcraft, #Online game, #Massively multiplayer online game, aeria games, guild wars 2, #Massively multiplayer online role-playing game, gpotato, blizzard, rift, nexon, guild wars, age conan, eve online, knight online, ragnarok, metin, world warcraft cataclysm, dragonica, defiance, ddtank, kongregate, drakensang, perfect world, tabula rasa, world warcraft wrath lich king, maplestory, aion, lineage or #Batman: Arkham Origins
who speak English (UK), English (Pirate), English (upside down) or English (US)
on Right column on desktop computers
Suggested bid: £0.14–0.29 GBP
Bid set to £0.35
Game is Planetside2
So far:
Campaign reach?
25,477
Frequency?
3.2
Clicks?
24
Click-Through Rate?
0.029%
Total Spent?
£7.10
Conversions
0.
Any ideas?
One ad seems to be getting all the work with the others lagging way behind, should I pause that one?
Planetside 2 generally converted well for me, though I found getting decent ad CTRs was quite hard. Split images into different campaigns so they get their own ad spend. Don't get attached to the 18-21 age group, I have found it is often the age pocket with a large audience - probably because they are more liberal with their social media likings - but also ad performance was often lower and backend conversion rates never quite kept up with 22-25/26-30 etc. Test test test though. How are you angling this one by the way - i.e. what are your creatives like? This offer will do well if you can nail the wording and get ad CTR up. Here are some images I used in the past:
If I remember rightly image 12 did particularly well across the board.
I used ad copy such as:
64 vs 64? Noob. 1000! / Jetpacks, Tanks, a Brutal FPS. This is Planetside 2. Join the WAR.
Step aside CoD! / 1000 vs 1000 players. FPS meets MMO - This is what you have to play to be called a gamer.
Hope that helps. If I reboot campaigns months from now and they perform like crap I'll know who to blame. Myself.
Thanks Zeno fantastic insight,
My angle is a recruiting campaign, 'Your Empire Needs You!' with imagery of the 3 main combatants. Also got a 'top Gun Pilots Needed' campaign going as well with images of the planes etc.
I'm going to add more creatives and split test the age groups I think, with GTA5 coming out recently I think attention is elsewhere!!
Stealth case study! Nice!
Ok quick update. Over 100 click throughs and not one conversion so far. All traffic seems to be going to 2 out of the 15 adverts I have running over 2 campaigns at the minute. At what point do I tweak or begin to wonder?
What is your CTR on the 2 ads that are getting the traffic. You should pause them if they are too low and then other ads will start running.
2 conversions!! My first affiliate money!! Ha haa!! not a bad feeling is it?
Paused the ad getting all the traffic and letting the others catch up, going to let it run and see what happens.
CTR's were 0.04 and 0.02, awful I know.
Congrats on your first affiliate money.
I'd do some more ad testing. It's going to be hard to profit with CTR's that low. Good luck!
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