iAds for self promotion

Has anyone utilized iAds to advertise your game? I am starting two campaigns both with 50 dollar budgets to test out what happens but wanted to hear from intone who has used that method before. The impressions are high, estimated downloads low, but I am thinking they give you conservative download numbers.

I figured since no one responded many must have the same question I did so here is what we did.

We ran an ad with Flurry setting a $200 dollar budget, stats are as follows:

We have not paid anything yet have had 4,855 impressions with 346 clicks on the add..

I am sure I need to spend more time tweaking this add, but it has reached people just no interest.

we did the same with iAds which in my opinion was a success depending on what you are looking for.

We ran a test campaign with our own thoughts on targeting and one with optimized targeting through apple.

Results are here:

Our targeting:

Spent 50 Dollars and received 4 downloads.

Optimized: Spent 117 dollars and received 32 downloads.

Neither looks to be great numbers, but it is clear Optimized works much better, also of note I missed a monster bug in our app that went live on an update during the Optimized campaign we reached all 32 downloads prior to the bug once the bug was released we received zero.

On the flip side we increased our daily downloads by 10-20% outside of the campaign so I personally feel the ad contributed to 150-250 downloads via sharing and game center folks seeing their friend had a new game.

I am now running a new iAD campaign to see what that nets us, and running a Facebook Mobile ad install campaign.

I will keep you all posted if any of you have found other ad services that have turned in better returns let me know we will try them out as well.

thanks for sharing, very interesting to read

Have you tried Facebook, AppLift and Chartboost? I think they are better choice for your mobile game start and you can also test everything with low budget. Read this article about mobile app marketing and decide for yourself.

Thanks a lot for sharing the numbers.

Well. Any advertising wasn't any good for us ever. Almost (I had some tricks but this wasn't too well at the end anyway). But any additional exposure is good anyway. Because later it sums to some wider awareness about you and your company.

PS I liked your FB page. If you don't mind I have some comments on the game. I'm sure you've already got a lot of them so sorry if I'll repeat some:
- you need to highlight that your main hero above the background and flying blocks ( backgrounds are very beautiful and bright but the creature is just invisible on them ) - make some glowing around it, make it different in color and brightness;
- perhaps you can even make that backgrounds not so bright and colorful (use them in full brightness in some positive moments in the game);
- current flying blocks are just out of your visual style - they strange and dul ( sorry! ) - they should attract player ( and creature ) attention, look more bright and dangerous, and better appeal to visual style of backgrounds and main hero (wooden beams perhaps? );
- add more active motions for that your creature, right now it just hangs down and don't react on neither player inputs or obstacle flying around it - the main game heros don't act so ;
- if I assume correct you should drag that circle under your hero to move it? Why you need it? Why don't let the player just drag in any part of screen to move it? I think it would give more freedom in game contol and people like the freedom.
Hope this helps

Thanks for the feedback, I had not thought about allowing the user to just drag on the screen.

We are looking into animations for the character as that has been a huge feedback..

The blocks are set that way as they are the building blocks in another game we have coming soon Morads which will be a lemmings style game so we were trying to keep the two connected, but we could easily change some visuals.

I am doing a Facebook campaign now and I have in the past, I have not tried chart post, but have had them recommended a lot to me so I will give them a look..

Thanks for the article it was a great read and help.

You also might want to try Smart App Banners for your iOS games. Free and easy to implement on your website.