Promotion idea FAILED

Hey,

I launched a promotion yesterday - made this house ad banner:

It leads to the page that says “Share your game score on Twitter and get full version of Doptrix Evolution for free. Conditions: bla-bla-bla”.

So the idea was to ask people to post about my game on Twitter and in return I will give them full version of my game.

And here is the FAIL - after 24 hours this banner was shown 200 times and got 0 (zero, null) clicks!

What’s wrong? Why nobody click this banner?

Hmm, I would have thought more people would be interested in a free upgrade. At least that somebody would have clicked through, even if they didn’t complete the whole offer.

Although, 200 clicks sounds like a lot at first - but then consider a CTR of 1% (not unusual for mobile advertising). With that CTR, you could only expect 2 clicks in that whole period. It’s quite possible that the banner just hasn’t been up long enough to get a statistically significant sample of people viewing it.

200 impressions is nothing, most of the people have “ad-blindness” that’s why even the best ads get a low CTR as long as you are not able to point the users on the ad.

At the end of march there were some really good ads out there, which were very eye-catchy. You just have to display them long enough. People will not click them, as long as they are “busy” with the game - sooner or later, they have the time to visit the ad - but at this point the ad has to be still visible.

That’s also why I do not understand, why admob does not support a refresh-rate over 120 sec … I will try to implement the refreshs by myself and see what happens :slight_smile:

Try this, put a dialog with the same text after someone is game over.
This gives the user more time to read the message, make sure the dialog looks important to read.

I actually tried this in Tablet Tower Defense :slight_smile:

Problem is: Ad Loading Time …

So all of these 200 people are “ad-blind”? This sucks…
Do Admob or AdWhirl or Inmobi allow animated gif banners? Maybe if I make a huge flashing letters (DOPTRIX! FREEE!! GET!!! IT NOW!!!) - then users will notice it?

Try this, put a dialog with the same text after someone is game over.

Sure this will work much better, but for this I’ll need to upload new version of my app to all stores…

No, the biggest problem is that you are putting an ad when users are playing the game.
The eyes will be focused on the game not the banner.
I have the same thing with a card game I play on regular base, I do not even noticed the ads in most game sessions. But at other apps, where I do not focus on the game part of the screen I will pick up the ads much quicker.

Yes, I think Martin’s idea of adding a dialog after the game finishes would be an effective option. Sure, it needs an app upgrade which can be tedious. But people have an amazing ability to ignore ads while a game is running. I tend to only notice static ads at the very start or finish of a game. If people playing Doptrix don’t hang around for very long on the game screen, they might not see anything until it’s too late.

Another option might be - when people click to try the Pro features, pop up with a dialog asking if they want to upgrade to get the full levels for free. If the users are already trying the pro features, they’re very likely to be interested at this point…

Yes, I understand these dialogs will be much more effective, but like I said, I’ll need to upload new version every time I want to change them.
Besides, I want to run this promotion only for a limited time or give away a limited number of promo codes. With house ads it’s easy to stop the promotion. And with hard-coded dialogs I can’t do that.

I think an interstitial ad will be as effective as dialog. Are house interstitial ads possible?

If the people are not interested in demo version of your app, then they are not interested in the full version. The better way to attract users is to ask mobile app marketing agency to make a marketing campaign for you. As example, App-Reviews helped me to solve my problems with low quantity of downloads, they increased it and it was organic installs. Installs helped me to increase reviews. This all lead to better popularity.