Dear all developers, I am planning to launch a title in the next couple of months *finger crossed*, and I am now considering banner placement in website like this one and also its mobile version. I've been asking around to other site and it is quite a big budget. Does anyone here have any experience that can be shared regarding this matter? Also any recommendation about website preference? Thanks in advance
Before you buy banner ads on websites, spend the money on a nice weekend with your girlfriend. You get more for your money. I say that even if I offer banner advertisement on my websites Banner ad MIGHT be useful up to some degree only in mobile ad networks, like AdMob, although AdMob is cheating with numbers IMHO. I can't speak for the other networks.
Therealtrebitsch, I'm curious what mobile apps/games you've advertised with banners and what kind of ROI you saw either in direct sales or overall brand recognition for you to dismiss them so quickly?
@hodapp: If you ask me so directly and you are a Toucharcade associate let me example with Toucharcade (which I didn't want to do originally): We advertised Alpine Crawler World here on Toucharcade. The game was #3 paid top overall and #2 paid games in the US before. We paid here $2500 - $3000 (or so... can't remember anymore) for a banner being visible between news posts for a month and we had maybe 50 clicks although we got reports about 5 million or so views. Now you can imagine, how many bought the game from those 50 clicks. We can discuss about the art and presentation of the banner and other marketing blahblah, but I've heard them all and it doesn't matter. We had other experiences as well, as advertisers and as AD-publishers, but I think, Toucharcade is the very best example. If you advertise here for iOS apps, you can take those numbers as absolutely maximum standard for any other website. Banner ADs are dead and they were already dead when they were invented. It can be useful with a marketing budget in the hundred thousand plus dollar range and for brand recognition, but not for direct marketing and for revenue. Small devs with a few hundred or even a few thousand dollar marketing budget should spend their money eswhere, not for banner ADs no matter how that ONE or TWO websites are visited and ranked. That is my experience and my opinion. And I don't mean it personally or try to make your business bad, but websites like Toucharcade (or even my websites) try to live from the fact, that there will be ALWAYS somebody, who wants to try before making his own opinion, because he wants to know for sure and don't want to think about "what would have been if..." I mentioned AdMob and other networks because I made the experience, that there I at least get 1000 clicks for my 50 bucks. If those clicks are real or not, is another story. They appear at least in the statistics.
Eh I think in this day and age if you're designing your advertising campaign around clicks you're already doing things wrong. I know I personally download a ton of stuff I see advertised that looks interesting, but I just search for things on my phone instead of ever actually clicking anything. Freeverse used to have tons of brand recognition around here in the early days because they exclusively tied up our top banner spot for years. It didn't even really link to anything relevant either. I think that went a long way towards keeping people at least knowing about and vaguely interested in Freeverse? That's a metric you can't really track, unfortunately. So, who knows.
It worked on me for NorEagle. But this kind of advertising takes a lot of time and money. You won't see instant results.
Don't tell anyone, but I think most people bough banner (or any advetising) with the hope to get in touch with the website editor... It doesn't mean that your game will be reviewed on the front page (they still want to publish something interesting), but your email will probably be read.
Ad requests go to a different person that is completely removed from the editorial team. I don't even know about banners and skins that are in rotation until I see them live on the site along with everyone else.
Just the opinion of one AppStore shopper. Browsing the AppStore tends to be a flurry of icons, names and stars. For me to tap on an app to look in further detail, it has to stand out in some way, whether it's a great icon, title that sounds like my kind of game, or I just recognize it for some reason even if I'm not sure why. I have definitely looked at apps that I recognized from ads. I don't think it probably affects my final decision to purchase or not, but imagery or title recognition gives an app a chance at least for me.
That's good that that is the case for this site, but some of your competitors are different. I've submitted promo codes to editors on other sites and ended up hearing from their sales department the next day trying to sell me advertising. In these cases, the editors didn't even use the promo code, they just forwarded the email off to the sales team.
That is the same thing that is happened to me for my previous title. After submitting promo code and request to be reviewed to the editorial email, we got an email reply by sales/advertising team. So is there an advertising in form of editorial review? Like you can pay for an article writing in news site. Is that possible to be done in game review site? Since some of them forwarded the email to advertising team.
