Expense Report: WordSearch Hero

DAU = 2.7k. IAP = $20 after Google’s cut.

no ads? just IAP ?

Yes, there are ads, but the CTR is 0.28% … I need to stop making addictive games that nobody wants to leave by clicking on ads :frowning:

20$ daily or total so far?

As for your downloads - you should do something. I’m afraid that at such rate, it will be hard to return your investment.

I hope you have some ideas for promotion. 30 day window will close soon.

@mind

I think your game is solid. the screenshots are good enough, I love the icon. I think it will do well. I definitely see at least $25k worth of work here.

Here is a quick list of things I would work on:

  1. I would stuff the description with more text, maybe some testimonials from users that mention other popular apps. This will rank you in search for more stuff as well as show you in related list of other popular apps (because you will be mentioning their apps in so called testimonials)

  2. You mentioned you are getting 200 downloads per day from FB and thats your ceiling, couple directions you can take this:
    a. Raise your daily budget if its not all the way up already, i noticed when i raise it, my exposure goes higher, this will also raise CPI but whatever, we are looking for downloads right?
    b. Expand your target audience, there are people out there that don’t know they want to play your game yet :wink:
    c. Expand into different geos: usa top 2 new & free is nice, but top 2 free overall in australia is better and download volume required might be the same for both. Try other english speaking markets (if your game is not localized in other languages) Canada is a good one, and purchasing power of those markets is very similar to USA.

As far as monetizations goes, i am sure that $20 number is overall i-app revenue, so I would incentivize the game with video views (lookup Vungle & Adcolony), say 50 turns per video view (not to piss off users since 50 turns is kind of a lot). Each video view is worth half a penny, with two views per day per user you are looking at $27 per day revenue on 2.7k DAU with high retention

I think you have solid DAU numbers, your retention is great on 10k installs. your revenue will compound gradually.

These are just my 2cents. You are welcome to not listen to my advice.

@toxic Thanks for the good advice ! Any thoughts on Tapjoy ? Both using to get users and (more importantly) implementing to give users more currency ?

never used tapjoy but they spam me on a monthly basis. i think as far as monetization goes, they are worth a shot, for marketing, i would stay away from anything incentivized.

@mind oh and I just read that Chartboost has now incentivized videos, which I think you should definitely try. Vungle and AdColony were reported to have lower ecpms lately

From my recent experience, Chartboost and Vungle gave me close no nothing (using MoPub for mediation). AdColony and TapJoy working decently, eCPMs around $4. Indeed, AdColony dropped eCPM from 5$.
Only Tapjoy is used for incentivization with in-game currency.
@mind, if not already done, publish your game on Amazon Appstore. IAP behavior is much better for us there (even beter than Apple Appstore).
eg: monthly ARPPU: $20, monthly ARPD 0.2$
This is considering 2K downloads / month on that market.

OK, so this will be a controversial post, so I am going to be careful NOT to accuse Facebook of any wrongdoing. Technically, I was paying them for installs, and NOT for real people that would actually play my game.

Why am I posting this? Because I stopped paying for FB ads because the “installs” I was paying for were not actually playing my game. Here is the proof.

This chart is the number of people in each game over 24 hours. The red line is the day before. Can you spot the extra 1000+ people that FB was supposedly sending me ?

imag

Here is the weekly chart. Somewhere in there is meant to be $5000 worth of additional players. Please tell me if you can see where they are:

image hosting 5mb

And just in case you were not sure I was really paying FB for installs:

upload image online

So… I paid $5k (of which, $2k was a coupon) for a bunch of installs on Google Play (which seem to have uninstalled the following day!)… and very few actual users.

Mind and others,

There are significant issues about Facebook Native advertising which are not raised by people yet:

So the Basic concept is ad embedded in content appear just like content?
So what would the most likely result of that?
a) Accidental Clicks.

Making ads looks like content used to called as clear Scam in old days. Now it is cleverly being marketed as Native Ads.

Cost Per Click for banners are low for a reason. i,e its mostly accidental clicks. But Cost per click for native ads (They are banner ads with significantly higher accidental clicks because they are placed in-between and looks like content) is significantly high.

FYI: Also since web ads most clicks on Facebook are by bots. Looks like same is true for Mobile ads.

OK , here is what I know:

  1. the worst place to display ads is facebook. (read articel few months back).
  2. targeted ads don’t work as expected.(Own experience and I read few articles too).

My advice is to stop using facebook and targeted ads.
Go for the people that are looking for something new. Make user profile and target by the profil.

PS
After purchasing low cost ticket, google kept showing me flight ads based on my IP… I already had the ticket… targeted is baaaad :smiley: … will be better to show me something completely different, something new for me.

PS2
At the end the good product doesnt need ads… Did you implement “Tell a friend” option?

Targeted is not bad. Its been around for a while and works fairly well.
You should understand the concept of retargeting which is fairly common.
Also large advertisers has a way to inform ad companies back about completion of purchase (to let advertisers know not to target anymore).

OK, I emailed the Google App Review team about WSH, since it is now pretty stable/etc. Let’s hope someone there reads the email and features WSH like they did to WordHero !

what is google app review? what’s the point of the email? Do they even read emails from small developers? Where did you get the email address to them?

Thanks for answer:)

Back in ‘the old days’, Google had a team that would review apps and if your app was good enough, it would get ‘Featured’ at the top app on Google Play. This would make it an instant success (as least as far as downloads go). However, some apps were not immediately ready (eg: no feature graphics), so an email address was set up so the Review Team could communicate with the developer.

My hope is that by emailing this (old) email address, someone will read it and check out WSH and maybe add it to the curated app lists.

And NO, I don’t feel comfortable providing this email address to anyone, since you needed to include certain headers with it to ensure it got to the right people and those headers are app specific (ie: I am (ab)using the WordHero headers).

It seems that you made Anagram Hero and Word Search Hero based on the certainty/strong belief that you would been featured, am i wrong? You have to consider that back in those days being featured resulted in 100´s of thousand of downloads because just a couple of games got featured, but now there are many categories, resulting in less downloads per app.

In my case, Tap the Box was featured as Fun with Physics in 2nd position for 4 weeks last year and brought 150k US downloads.

My point is that basing the success of an app on being featured (not saying you did that) is very risky, the app should be good enough to be able to take off on his own.

Did you wrote to google as mind or they’ve seen you because you had good app?

You’re absolutely right - recently i’ve read some article about being featured. It gave someone much less downloads. Market is changing, rules are changing too.

But let’s get back to topic - Word Search Hero.

I’m afraid of one thing. I hope i’ll be wrong, but i’m afraid that mind could make one mistake. His first game - Word Hero was featured and gained success because it was very simple yet enjoying. Letters were big thanks to 4x4 board. So control was very easy - no problem with touching letters. Also game was playable on low end phones.

2nd and 3rd game is based on similar concept (online game) but with different rules, different gameplay. Basically (from what i’ve read) there are more features, more everything. But maybe somewhere simplicity has been lost. I’ve read that some ppl are complaining that letters in word search hero are too small - i see that board is 12x12 - so it makes huge difference. Probably on smaller phones players have huge problems with touching them. That may lead to more uninstalls and worse install / uninstall ratio. And ultimately to worse position in rankings. Also maybe concept of searching words is not so enjoying for ppl as making them.

I hope i’m wrong.

I made them with the belief that I could make a game that was good enough to get featured. However, I did not assume that I would get the game featured.

Maybe… But I like to make game that are simple at first, but have a secondary game built into them. This keeps it interesting for more advanced users. Incidentally the board size is now 11x11 … server configurable :slight_smile: