How I leaked $ 1000 to the promotion of the game and what came out of it

Greetings, in this article I want to go over the most critical moment for any mobile game developer, namely, to promote them.

For many, the situation is familiar, I did, I did, and besides friends, no one saw the game, and after all tried so hard! There will be no vague wording or assumptions for promotion under the cut. Specifically, the links - specifically the result. Go!

Coming right up to the release a sharp question arose in the promotion of the game. In the course of development, I set a bar for $ 1000 for myself, which I planned to unconditionally infuse. Alas, it is almost impossible to get a proper audience without investments, of course, there is a chance that you will be lucky, the stars will form and everything will work out, but it does not always work the way you want.
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1) Publish an article on w3bsit3-dns.com with the project developer support.

Omit this thing is just a crime. It's no secret that w3bsit3-dns.com is the heart of mobile games for the CIS countries. There are several packages that can be used, you can learn more about them at the following link .

For my game, I used the tariff plan "Complex". From pluses in comparison with others:

- Discount on future placements (10%)
- Banner support for Apps Promo (rotation) for 7 days
- Support in social networks (VK, Twitter, Facebook)

An important point: it is better to order 1.5-2 weeks before the release. In my case, it took 8 days from order to publication (including weekends). Therefore, to get a push right from the first day, you need to order such things in advance and in the future simply specify the date of publication.

What the results. According to the tariff plan "Complex" the following figures should have been:

- Coverage = 280-310 thousand
- Reads (unique) = 3-15 thousand

I don’t know if it’s correct to put here the actual report on these figures, which was sent by w3bsit3-dns.com in a couple of weeks, probably not, so I’ll just say that the coverage turned out to be slightly less than predicted, but the readings turned out in the middle of the predicted version.

Now, according to my impressions: immediately after the publication, the races of installations, assessments, and all that was actually going. The game was released on November 25, November 30 was the publication of an article on w3bsit3-dns.com:



The publication was a day (somewhere in the 15-16 hours) and the schedule immediately shows how the installation fell down. The peak was 167 installations per hour. During the day the game scored 1 169 installations. If you compare with the first 5 days (50-150 installations on average). It turned out a very good increase.

Obvious advantages - after the publication, many less popular resources began to write reviews on the game, someone just duplicated an article from w3bsit3-dns.com. In any case, all subsequent days of installations became more:



Of course, not the golden mountains, but the start is given. These figures were specifically for me, you can have them 2-3 times better, or perhaps worse. It all depends on what kind of game you will promote. Will I continue to try publishing on w3bsit3-dns.com? Undoubtedly, for, as I wrote above, it is foolish to bypass this project of support for developers.

2) Promotion through YouTUBE channels.

This method of promotion became for me the main one. He managed to get the highest growth of installations (this does not mean that you only need to use it! Promotion is a huge complex work, where you need to use everything possible, because only this way you can achieve proper results). The great advantage is that interested people usually watch videos on YouTube, so the final conversion increases many times.

I want to say that finding YouTube channels is not so easy. He included a player, went to YouTube and through the search for “top new games on Android / iOS” tried to look for the most accessible and interesting options. Some, by the way, themselves turned to the post office and offered their options for promotion.

As promised, no water, here is a list of YouTUBE channels that I managed to find and with which I ended up collaborating:

- Game Day
- ¡Yes Droid!
- Ben Said
- PDAlife applications
- Game Plan
- Goodman
- Phone Planet
- Apple Theme
- Game Station
- KINATVIDEO
- Dietrich TV

It is difficult to select the best channels. Everything coped perfectly in terms of price-quality. Just in case, I will single out one channel:

- ¡Yes Droid! After the publication (ordered 4th place in the top) there was a very large influx of installations from Mexico. After just a couple of days, Google started shouting that “your application is gaining popularity! Urgently translate into Spanish. " Actually the same thing was written by the players through the reviews.

Total: YouTUBE is a very cool platform to promote games. The clips will hang all the time, the views will be slightly increased, and as a result, the exhaust from such orders will be held for more than a month.

3) Promotion through social. network

Originally planned to use targeted advertising on VK, facebook, twitter and instagram.

- Vkontakte: well , a big plus of this social. Network is the ability to customize specific groups / communities. What I did was looking for the most popular communities, looked to be more or less alive (publications should type likes, comments and of course views), and all of them just shoved into the settings of the target, thus, my advertisement was watched by those people were subscribed to gaming communities and thus were interested in such news. I tried to promote such news with such settings in VKontakte:



The result is the following:



It’s a lot or a little difficult to say (there’s nothing to compare, very few people will share the successful method for free, unfortunately), so I tried another advertising news, but it showed even worse results. In general, I leaked it to $ 50. After I decided to stop, because ordering a video on YouTUBE will be much better.

- Facebook: I tried to make a small announcement before the release. Alas, due to the fact that Facebook is not possible to make a target for specific groups / pages (as it is done in VK), it turned out that there were thousands of views and almost zero clicks on the news itself. It was too difficult for me to set up a target so that users were interested in the news, so this method was not used in the promotion after release.

- Instagram: probably because of its stupidity decided to abandon the use of this network. I thought that on Instagram, basically people like zombies leafing through pictures and tapping likes. You cannot achieve more from them, but as one person said, he managed to get quite good results (news was made with the “Download” button). Maybe it was worth trying, but it's too late, at least with the current game I won't do it anymore.

- Twitter: this soc. network and without advertising showed good results. He published various tweets with screenshots from the game and made sure to indicate the hashtags; the best sheet of hashtags highlighted the best for him:

# unity3d #mobilegame #games #indiedev #indiegame #gamedev #development #lowpoly #android #iOS #newgames #arcade

With him, tweets received 5-10-20 retweets and as a result, the audience coverage increased significantly.



Everywhere where views jumps - there were publications. Of course, it’s hard to say how many installations got from them (and whether they got them at all), but let's be frank - the more people see, learn about the game - the more installations will be in the end.

Total, soc. networks have a place to be as part of an integrated game promotion. The result is certainly not high, but in any case it is, and if it is, it means that it cannot be missed.

4) Attempts to declare the game on large resources.

If you don’t have any money at all for promotion, don’t despair, you can always get lucky by writing forms to various large resources on mobile games via Contact Us. Who knows, maybe you are lucky and want to make a review on your game.

I give you the royal link to Google Docs, Click ME! which contains a huge list of foreign resources for mobile games. Some of them will ask for payment, while others may agree to do a free review. While I sent about ten letters for the test, the answer is zero, but maybe the reason is in my game, I will try further, the list is very extensive, sooner or later someone will agree to help!

With regards to the Russian-speaking audience, here the database on the promotion of mobile games helped me a lot. Unfortunately, there is no open access to it, as in the case of the English-language counterpart, but to get it is quite simple, there are several options (tell about your promotion experience, share links, or make a repost in social networks). The link was issued on the same day, so I strongly recommend to get it. There is quite an extensive list, in any case, something will be useful for you!

As a result, feel free to run through the list of the above two links, there both forums and websites and YouTube channels, write to everyone and everything. The more people know about the game, the better!

Results

What ultimately happened. Now the number of installations averages 1000-1500 a day.



Sometimes there are bursts of up to 2000 installations, but this is rare. For 25 days, we managed to get closer to the mark of 30k installations. The figure does not seem to be bad, but because At the moment, the game is dominated by the CIS countries, the income from the game is rather modest. On advertising (Unity Ads) managed to dial almost $ 100



On in-app purchases, while we’ve gotten $ 67. What is the sum of light laugh :)
How the game will behave in the future, it is difficult to assume that on the 25th it will be 30 days from the moment of release, as a result, the game will fall out of the “top new free games” and presumably the installation will go down in the same way. There is already time.

These are the results obtained. In fact poured $ 950. I got about 30k installations on the exhaust (I think I’ll reach 30k in 5 days).

As for me, enough to be afraid to share my own promotion methods, I really had to spend a lot of time to find all the resources described above. Very often I stumbled upon recommendations from the category: “I used YouTube, a bunch of forums, and you use it!”, And which ones you used, how you used it, are silent everywhere. I understand that having achieved very good results, such information will be worth its weight in gold, but you need to remember that life is arranged in such a way that the more you give, the more you get. So, share your links, together we can finally curb all the pleasures of mobile games promotion.