Experimenting with user acquisition part #1

15 April 2015 #advertising #frvr #startup #gamedev #money

As mentioned in my On building a strong brand post, I am unlikely to be able to do cost positive user acquisition for the types of games I am building. 

However as I still have a full time job paying my expenses, I decided to use the first revenue generated from advertisement trying anyway.

I spend $400 on four platforms. For each is that I targeted USA, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. Mainly because they are richer and speak english. Sadly I had momentarily forgotten about the United Kingdom so no data from there. Likewise I tried targeting only Desktop where possible. Some more details:

• Google AdWords 
• Targeting: Solitaire related search keywords. 
• Platforms: Search and Display network.
• Bing Ads
• Targeting: Solitaire related search keywords. 
• Platforms: Search and Display network.
• Yahoo Gemini
• Targeting: Solitaire related search keywords. 
• Platforms: Display network  and mobile search
  
• Facebook Ads
• Targeting: People who like solitaire games
  
• Platfom: Web only

To ensure easy tracking and that I re-captured as much value from users I paid for, I created unique landing pages plastered with ads. An example would be this url: http://frvr.com/play/solitaire/ad/bing/

As the ad pages does not work for users playing on a mobile phone, I redirected these users to the version of the game without ads.

For all campaigns I optimised the campaigns to buy clicks as cheaply as possible. All spends where completed between April 1st and April 10th. 

Here is the results:

• Google Adwords
  
• Spend: $100
• Avg CPC: $0.07
• Clicks: 1427
  
• Unique visits: 1332
• Total sessions: 1614
  
• Click to play drop-off: 6.60%
• Mobile user ratio: 45%
• Average time on page: 01:08:47
• Revenue: $86.21
• ROI: -14%
• Bing Ads
• Spend: $100
• Avg CPC: $0.062
• Clicks: 1613
  
• Unique visits: 1023
• Total sessions: 1686
  
• Click to play drop-off: 36.59%
  
• Mobile user ratio: 10%
• Average time on page: 00:30:24
  
• Revenue: $55.70
  
• ROI: -44%
• Yahoo Gemini
• Spend: $100
• Avg CPC: $0.093
• Clicks: 1075
• Unique visits: 755
  
• Total sessions: 1087
  
• Click to play drop-off: 15.74%
  
• Mobile user ratio: 29.77%
• Average time on page: 00:35:46
  
• Revenue: $46.37
  
• ROI: -54%
  
• Facebook Ads
• Spend: $100
• Avg CPC: $0.06
• Clicks: 1667
  
• Unique visits: 1360
• Total sessions: 1929 
  
• Click to play drop-off: 18.42%  
  
• Mobile user ratio: 0%
• Average time on page: 00:40:01
  
• Revenue: $75.72
  
• ROI: -24%
  

Normally I would hesitate to draw conclusions on spends this quickly. However data from these gave me the insights that made me realise that I currently only have a MVP, not a finished product.

The below cohort retention graph summes it up quite nicely:

While users are clearly having fun while playing the game, playing for up to an hour, they simply do not return and play the game subsequently. There will therefore be next to no additional revenue from these test spends.

Sadly this is not just a problem with users acquired from ads. My average 1 day retention is only 7.30% which is pretty far from my goal of at-least 50%. 

Over the next weeks I will therefore add new game features to increase retention while making it easier for users to bookmark and find the app versions of the game.

Looking at the actual quality of the traffic. Google Adwords is the clear winner as the best ad-network. Very low drop-off rate, highly engaged users and good monetisation. It’s even possible that I can already do cost-postive user acquisition with google if I added advertisement to the mobile experience.

All in all, even after loosing $136 doing the experiment, I believe it was a huge success which I am sure to repeat when the updated version of the game goes live. 

If you have recommendations for even better working advertising platforms or other crazy clever ideas I would love to hear about them so I can include them in future experiments!