The best sites, other than TA of course, to buy add space on?

I've advertised Charmed on AppModo.com, TouchArcade.com and now PocketGamer.co.uk.

I've spent $500 so far in ads, and have had basically zero results from all three ads, even now that they are running simultaneously. I've been using bit.ly to track my clicks, so I can see the day-by-day changes.

PocketGamer gave the most clicks in a single day with 70, but that quickly fell to 50, then 30, then 17.

Oddly on the day when I got 50 clicks, my sales DROPPED from 12 to 2! Not sure what to make of that. Does that mean people were planning to buy Charmed, but then after seeing the ad decided against it?

Another weird thing. The 9 days BEFORE my ad on PocketGamer, Charmed sold an average of 10.3 copies per day. The 9 days AFTER my ad went live, I sold an average of 8.4 copies per day.

You might gain a bit of awareness about your game with these small ads, but don't expect to make your money back. It's unlikely. In fact, the PocketGamer ad guy told me that it is unreasonable to expect the ad to pay for itself. He said that it's just not the way advertising normally works. I thought that sounded silly, but it appears to be true in my case.

 

The theory is that it's less about direct click through and more about brand awareness. After seeing reviews + ads + twitters + facebook + app promotion (if you're lucky) it's built up enough awareness that when they see it on the store they decide it's worth it to buy it.

It's up to you if you buy into the theory, but I do know that one or two ads won't do anything. It really needs to be a more significant and far reaching approach.

 

Me either, which has led me to believe that advertising for iPhone games with a small budget is a waste of money.

For me, the stranger thing is that these websites are directly targeted at our core audience of iPhone gamers. If these guys aren't buying games, then who is?

Perhaps we need to be advertising on more mainstream non-gaming sites. Those guys seem to charge much higher rates though. Wired wanted $18 CPM which seemed just crazy to me.

When I told them that it was too expensive, they offered a "deal" which they claimed was perfect for a small iPhone game developer. They offered 1,250,000 impressions of a text-only ad on reddit.com over a one month period for the bargain price of $10,000!

Clearly we are not on the same page!

 

I think advertising is a really tricky issue and you have to pick sites carefully. I was checking out a game on YouTube which seems to have been advertised on a massively popular but totally non-gaming site. Result is that the game has reached a very wide potential customer-base but generated a lot of stupid and unhelpful comments which I think may have backfired on the dev to some extent. The game is Stunt Driver & it's had more than 49,000 YouTube views which you would normally expect to see when something is a huge hit. Just my humble, non-expert opinion...

 

Do you guys target bloggers at all?
After all, if you google for iphone / ipod touch and find some good blogs then won't others? A few promo codes for a review couldn't hurt could it? And the potential to spread the word is better than throwing them into the forum here.

 

Do not advertise! You will lost your money.

 

Pamx those 49,000 views were thanks to my younger brother who happens to be a youtube star. He just put it on his channel for a few days. Unfortunately however many of his fans are teenage girls who don't play iPhone games.

 

Your best bet is continuing with the forum threads, having a link to your website
(if you have one-if not get one), maybe create a banner ad for those sites that allow them in a sig, and hit twitter, facebook etc hard.

I'm not a dev but I am a small publisher, and talking with other small press publishers, we've all come to the conclusion that paying for advertising is more of a problem than the payoff. Since I'm in the position of actually getting our books together, and don't have any for sale at the moment, my partner and I are still doing some prelim marketing with boards, our website, twitter, word of mouth, etc.

Rummage has an avg of a 4 star rating for all versions, has been featured in iTunes new and noteworthy, and was in the top ten for word games. Use that info in blog posts, banner ad etc. People are more likely to click and look if they see info like that.

Quick example. When a friend's novella came out last year, it did okay. Not great. Over the summer an e-version came out, and it landed at #3 on horror mall's top 10 list; not only did sales shoot up for the e-version but the physical version also saw more sales.

you may think I'm comparing apples and oranges, but a product is a product. People like to know they won't be wasting their time by taking a look, if they see some positive feedback before clicking.

 

I guessed that was what happened. Your brother's site is amazing & it's mind-boggling to think that his videos get so many views. I really like your game though and was disappointed to see so many irrelevant and ignorant comments. Maybe next time don't allow comments at all? (I don't know if that's even possible with YouTube). The site's a powerful way to get your stuff seen and, as someone said already, if only a tiny percentage buy your game, it's worth having the exposure.

 

Perhaps most of the people buying apps don't even care to look at internet sites for them, maybe they just go to their app store and see whats on there.
Before I was developing for the iPhone, but was downloading apps for fun, I doubt I ever went to a website "searching" for Apps. I was just looking at the App store on the phone itself and seeing what looked good in the list.
That's a terrible thought, thinking that advertising is a waste of money, and that indie developers really can't make it happen. It could be a trend of the App store itself though. It seems like people are much more selective when they purchase Apps now, I've heard some people say - on this forum - that they wouldn't even consider purchasing an App unless it was in the top ten, or even #1! Maybe this is why the free apps with in-app purchases will gain some ground. We'll just have to see. My two cents.

 

Still, it does seem like getting some exposure on the internet in general, whether on an app review site, in the forums, on your own webpage, etc., does help the overall cause, and there is no one magic solution. I think the trick is quantifying and measuring the effect of your different efforts (such as using link shorteners that keep track of the number of times they've been clicked) and focusing on the cost-effective ones.

 

The trick though is thinking outside of the box somewhat, and challenging established ways of marketing. I'm not a dev, but I am an indie book publisher, and while there are some similarities, there's also some differences. One of the things I've done as a writer to get some exposure, is doing guest blogs on other writer's sites, and have them write for my blog. Not only has that bumped up my blog hits, its generated more friends on FB, more followers on twitter, and more interest in general.

Now that may or may not be feasible with app dev's but it's been working for me slowly but surely.

 

I just bought an ad on Somethingawful.com. 29.95 for a month. Figure it is worth a shot!

 

As far as I know, buying one, two or three ads isn't very effective. As others have stated, it is about repeated exposure and brand awareness and not specific click-throughs.

Before buying any ads, make sure everything is in place. Do everything you can to get placement, and once you find a wave, ride it out as long as you can with more news, updates, WHATEVER.

Marketing is not passive.

I do admire the patience of some of these devs, though. A lot of developers blow everything they have in one shot and can't determine what worked and what didn't. At least some of you made a small change and watched what happened.

 

I've dabbled in ads. I agree that on most sites, with reasonably click-thru and purchase conversion rates, you're not going to make your money back. The hope, imo, is that the boost will put you higher up in the category top 100 lists in the store, thus gaining you more exposure. Hard to say though...

For me, the best thing is reviews. A popular board game fan site reviewed Xeno Sola and sales immediately picked up. The cost was giving the review a free app.

Promo codes in general work better than ads, imo. They "cost" less, get you exposure and goodwill, and help boost your app ranking directly.

 

You might be onto something there - Bryan Mitchell (Geared) chose that site and ran an add soon after release. Obviously, he did very well with a reported 276,784 paid downloads (although maybe it was a coincidence...)

 

I had thought about running some ads there as well, but I didn't realize they were so cheap.

I'm not sure how effective running an ad at sites like digg, reddit or fark might be.