Advertising on Facebook

We've tried it with our game Zepiark, but I can't say that there was a huge effect. There were some clicks, but it didn't influenced sales that much.
Maybe the budget was not that big, not sure.

 

Have you looked at the prices yet? I did, unless you're selling an expensive product I can't see it being worth while.

 

We tried it at the agency I work for with one of our clients. It worked REALLY well at driving traffic to their site. There are a community college.

But I'm not sure how well it would work for a game since your demographic has to be so specific.

I imagine it would be difficult to find that special person that:
b.) Is interested in games. (easy)
a.) Has an iDevice. (hard)

The nice thing about advertising here at TA or other iphone game related sites is that the people here already meet those criteria. You don't have to worry about wasting money advertising to people who can't even get your product.

But OstinGirl said they had an impact, just not a huge one. So it must work at least a little.

 

There's no fixed rate; it uses a bid system - but it does give estimates for what you need to bid to get an ad up.

 

I use FB on a daily basis, but I never pay any attention to the ads; I usually ignore them altogether. Try creating a Fan page instead..It might help and its free.

 

I know a developer that set up a Facebook ad campaign to promote a game (I can't say which game).

They fixed a budget and set the criteria in a way that the ads only got shown to Apple employees (Not sure how). He found that the ads in themselves didn't increase sales too much, BUT someone at Apple took notice of the ads and their game got featured in the what's hot section of the appstore in some western European appstores which in turn gave the game a significant boost in daily sales i.e: From 30 units to 500 units a day. Also he claimed that well after being featured the game had a long tail in unit sales.

The developer is convinced that these ads are the reason it got featured as they had no other contact with Apple and the game was a very common card game.

That's my two cents on Facebook ads. I've never used them personally.

 

I gave it a try. Probably not the best choice for promoting a free game!

I targeted Bejeweled Blitz players who speak English, and was very clear to put "Super Search 60 for iPhone" in the link, so as to minimize false clicks.

Got a metric tonne of impressions, quite a reasonable amount of clicks, but it burns through the cash quite quickly of course as you do have to put up a reasonable bid in order to ensure that your ad appears. Impressions on a game website would be far more important.

Given that my game uses Facebook Connect to run the leaderboard, I thought it would be an obvious choice, but it simply turns out that I'm paying people to play my free game.

Much better was the wall postings for those who play the game and reach score milestones. The icon and image look nice, and I'm getting a regular stream of traffic of people finding the game in this way. That's far better than any direct facebook advertisment in my opinion. Some people have close to 1000 facebook friends, so that's great coverage.

I set my first trophy to 50,000 points. It's something that not everyone can achieve straight away. Takes around 10 or 20 games to get good enough to get that score. So - people really feel good about picking up that first trophy. And I've noticed almost everyone who reaches the milestone posts their score.

If I can just get the word to more people in one burst - and hit the chart - then I'd definitely have something very big!

Hence the value of high traffic one-hit websites such as FreeAppADay.