Can a Harry Potter inspired game for kids make money? Accio profit! (13)
Can a Harry Potter inspired game for kids make money? Accio profit!
Since I was interested in getting my feet wet with games, my AM recommended an offer for a kids game called Wizard101.
The campaign hasn't been going well, and I'm about to ditch it, but I'll note down my progress until this point. I'm also going to try a few more things before I abandon ship.
Offer Info
Payout: 1.60
No Facebook or Search traffic allowed
Advertiser provided creatives, own creatives need approval
Countries: US, CA, AU and NZ
Converts on single opt in
The advertiser offers a lander with a quiz on it, the results link to the user's account when they start the game, so the quiz actually has a purpose. https://www.wizard101.com/wizardCrea...medium=display
Once you're done with the quiz, a download link is provided for installation on Mac OS X or Windows.
What I've done so far
Traffic Sources
- Since this is a desktop game, all my usual mobile traffic sources are out. I started with Bonazda since I saw it mentioned a few times on the forum. Since I don't have an idea of what sites will work, and Bonadza doesn't seem to offer RON (couldn't find it), I chose a dozen or so placements to start.
- Very few clicks with the stock creatives. Bonadza shows a CTR of 0.32% (95 clicks out of 29,245) which is already not great. But my tracker shows that only 21 of those are real clicks. And the Affiliate Network credited me with 14 of those. Given my spend, that makes my CPC around $4! And that's with zero conversions - though even if every click was a conversion I'd still be bleeding money. Not good.
- I started talks with Ad4Game, they don't seem to like affiliates anymore. After giving them $500 to fund my account, they saw that I have a redirect (standard Prosper202 setup going to my tracker and then redirected to Wizard101) and have a real issue with that. Trying to figure that out with my account manager at Ad4Game, otherwise I can look forward to fighting for a refund.
The lesson so far is that the stock creatives likely suck (I've attached one of them). And the placements don't target kids, I expect this game would appeal to those 12 and under who are into magic card battling type RPGs. That's easy enough to target on FB, and is possible through some of the in-game mobile ad networks by prioritizing certain placements, but seems impossible on Bonadza.
I have an artist in the Philippines who I pay $9/hr to who does great art. I might have her spend 2 hours to make a better creative that doesn't look like an abomination of a Nintendo 64 game.
I'm going to post in the newbie forum asking for traffic source suggestions that would work with a campaign like this. Most of the ad networks for desktop games have made me tear my hair out with their minimum spends and lack of responsiveness!
Just for fun, I might capture some gameplay footage and cut up a trailer and try YouTube advertising also since I've never done that before and I think it would be a fun learning experience.
Otherwise $20 more in additional creatives and a bit more ad spend and this one is going to the offer graveyard.
Hey man,
I've run that offer before, it converts like a bastard with the right placements.
You're dead on with aiming for the younger demo, but with my own camps I
found that it converted better on female-centric sites. No idea why, but it
was too much to be just coincidence.
Figure out where that demo hangs out online, get your ads in front of them,
and wait and see what happens.
For the creatives, before you get an artist involved, throw some together
yourself with Paint. They'll do better than the stock ones, I promise. Then
once you have a solid angle that gets the most performance, you can get
your artist to create design variations on that angle.
Good luck!
Wizard101 has been around for a very long time and has done huge revenues.
That's one disadvantage - it has been highly exposed.
However, it has for sure been vetted and clearly converts! How many more people you can convert is a separate issue.
Check out http://www.similarweb.com/website/wizard101.com
It should be clear from the stats that this game has done volume - it is in the top 1000 ranks for the US!
From the traffic source data it's clear that display is probably the biggest paid advertising source, which makes sense as you would find sites that cater to women/girls/kids and advertise there. Search shows it's mainly organic so little paid advertising there.
On Facebook you can only target age 13 at the minimum and that will capture every kid who has joined up and lied about their age (Facebook ToS). IIRC the Wizard101 payout is also not that high for US traffic which makes advertising to older females not so easy.
Targeting children on the web in general has some added complications -- AFAIK there are various bits of legislation out there that influence the privacy of children online, e.g. if a child joins a site and their age is below 13, then the site might not be able to cookie them and/or advertise to them, etc. I'm not sure how this works, I just recall reading something about this. See e.g. http://www.coppa.org/
Further on SimiliarWeb, the top referring sites are mostly ad networks and gaming networks - so again, display has taken predominance here.
The other data should also give you some ideas:
Have a look at some of those sites and see if you can get ad placements on them through a readily accessible DSP. Bonadza I'm sure has a Runescape placement!
If you also click on one of the audience interest categories you can find other sites in that category. This is quite broad, but you could at least find high volume sites and open em up to see who they might appeal to, then plug these into Alexa/Quantcast/etc. to get some more data e.g. demographics.
Anyway, this is more an example of how I would learn a bit more about how to target for such an offer.
IMO though, I would ditch this campaign on display - generally expensive traffic and a low payout offer that has already received more volume than most gaming offers available. Wizard101 for a long time (and in some cases still!) tops network charts for volume....
the_writer, thanks for sharing your experiences, glad someone has been able to make this convert. 
That's really useful to know regarding the gender / demographic info!
zeno, that's awesome. I didn't know about SimilarWeb, that'll be very handy. Agreed, if Wizard101 has been around for a while, it's probably super saturated. Kind of like Candy Crush or Clash of Clans at this point. And I just checked, Bonadza does have a Runescape placement. I'll see if I can get some data for that along with following your suggestions for investigating targeting ideas.
It won't take me much time to cut up a little trailer and see if I can get approval to do a little YouTube advertising also. The SimilarWeb investigation might help me with what keywords and interests I should use for the targeting. The SimilarWeb profile showed that while only a small amount of traffic came from social (< 3%), most of it did come from YouTube. That could be a niche that can grow.
That's really awesome. Thanks for the info guys, gives me a lot to look over and think about.
Wizard101, never ran it but seen it for ages! It's done some big numbers.
If you can find a way to leverage youtube for traffic, you might figure out something really interesting. Youtube drives some of the most downloads and highest conversion rates for console and mobile games and i could see it being evern higher with web games. You just need to find the right angle to attack.
One idea is to research game reviewers (there's some GIANT ones on YouTube who share 1 video about a game and are solely responsible for the success of a game) and see if you can leverage their name somehow.
Originally Posted by stackman
Originally Posted by cmdeal
I have a list of 400, a lot who are a lot bigger than pewdiepie, some are in very specific genre's though.
There's a couple games that have been in the top 100 PAID downloads section in the iOS app store that stay there for 1yr+ due to pewdie's 1 video he made for the game.
Its a pity he's so annoying. Possibly the most overrated youtuber out there.
How did he get so big?
Appeals to a large demographic of girls/guys who are very casual gamers and have a primitive sense of humour (i.e. find it enjoyable listening to someone who whines and makes stupid voices over his gameplay).
I have no idea why, really.
A lot of the big channels involve videos that have no creative value. But we live in a world where tweens think the hash symbol was invented by twitter.
Some Youtubers pump out really cool videos and are well deserving of their accolades - e.g. FreddieW, nigahiga, etc.
If you look at some of the top Youtubers (http://www.celebritynetworth.com/art...youtube-stars/), many of them seem to have gotten there by making videos that you'd have to pay me to sit through. Just look at the most recent work from Smosh - with an estimated annual earnings of ~$6 million:
It's like MTV.
Originally Posted by zeno
I have no idea why, really.
A lot of the big channels involve videos that have no creative value. But we live in a world where tweens think the hash symbol was invented by twitter.
Some Youtubers pump out really cool videos and are well deserving of their accolades - e.g. FreddieW, nigahiga, etc.
If you look at some of the top Youtubers (http://www.celebritynetworth.com/art...youtube-stars/), many of them seem to have gotten there by making videos that you'd have to pay me to sit through. Just look at the most recent work from Smosh - with an estimated annual earnings of ~$6 million:
It's like MTV.
Thanks for all the suggestions! I made a small 15 second trailer / ad and sent that to my AM for approval (creatives need advertiser approval). If that works, then trying to advertise to the viewers of Let's Play type videos, PewDiePie, etc could work well. I don't like the idea of going through creative approval for every permutation of the ad that I want to test. But let's see how this goes.
Didn't want to spend a huge amount of time on a fancy trailer, so it's just something simple I made in iMovie. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6_1Ezk5XFA
Nice work mate, very interested to see how that one performs!
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