I saw this in his .plan today and thought it was very intresting and some people here might also find it usefull.

http://www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=5083

Just a couple of comments...

JT writes...

>Our conversion rate on the Torque demo since we released it on
>October 10, 2003 has been 3.86%. If these numbers hold true

In my experience as an ad draws more people to your product your conversion ratio *typically* goes down. He qualifies it by saying "if these numbers hold true" but I'd prefer to see the conversion ratio tracked directly. Something like adwords does tend to be a little more direct and close to non advertised searches than say a banner ad, but I suspect that it still won't convert as well as a non-paid search. (in part that depends on the ad itself.. more on this below) In fact his rate of return on this thing entirely depends on how well people from google and indeed people from his particular wording convert.

Even two ads on google could convert wildly differently depending on the wording. I've seen it expressed in many articles about pay per click and by many people that your best tactic is to keep the rate of return high by actively discouraging hits to your site. Let's say for example that torque was 1000$ (it isn't... this is just hypothetical) then to put the price in the ad would discourage anyone looking for a cheaper or free engine and raise your rate of return. It may actually be bad to try and actively encourage as many clicks as possible in order to gain more sales. But again that depends. It depends on your strategy for using the ad. If your entire goal is to build a bigger customer base or name brand recognition it may be ok to lose money on the ad and product being advertised, and make it back later in some other way.

Well, Jeff's figures to me seem like google have damn good scam going.

Basically the cost-per-click is VERY high for what it is. Unless youve got a high traffic site which also has google adversiting (which GG has and thus offsets the cost) its just ludicrous to expect that the cost involved is worth it.

How many people could afford that kind of cost PER CLICK, as part of thier product, given that those are converted at probably a far far lower amount that GG will get.

I must admit that I would love to use adwords, because I rate google and think it'd get more eyeballs on my game. But frankly, I'd probably be able to do that cheaper by doing some stupid stunt :)

In fact, I might even try the "stupid stunt" method when my game is close to finishing.. i dunno.. streaking or something :)

Originally posted by zoombapup

In fact, I might even try the "stupid stunt" method when my game is close to finishing.. i dunno.. streaking or something :)

It's a shame your game wasnt ready a few weeks ago...you could have sponsored Jordan on "I'm a celebrity get me out of here". Your url on that chest would have attracted some eyeballs:)


Alfie

Hehe.. its got enough space :)

Probably a bit pricy though.

Maybe I could have sponsored a snake to go and eat em all instead, would have been more fun.

I agree with Svero that just guessing doesn't really make it. I have run an Adwords campaign for about 5 months now and it has so far been profitable. However, it wasn't profitable in the beginning, and I would never have been able to optimize it for profitability without having hard data on how many actual purchases result from the clicks, and which creatives resulted in those purchases. Having a high CTR doesn't neccessarily equal a good profit, I had ads with less CTR outsell ads with higher CTR (as Svero pointed out).

Even more, the dataset Jeff has is pretty small, ie. 2.3 purchases based on the ads. For a game I wouldn't trust this data initially unless you had a minimum of 30-50 purchases. After that I would probably wait for a minimum of about 5-10 purchases between making changes to the ads, just to have enough data. If your volumes are higher you could easily take a tenfold number of samples ..

Don't trust my word (or Jeff's for that matter), measure your own specific case.. :)

It isn't hard to get high click-throughs with Google ads. I tried "shareware games" one time and got a 6.5% click-through rate. But for all the Google keywords I tried, the traffic was too expensive and didn't yield enough sales. The unpaid Google listings heavily outpulled the paid listings.

One problem is that Google will drop your ads if you don't get a high enough CTR. But you don't usually want a super-high CTR. You only want clicks from the most qualified prospects. So if you word your ads to pre-qualify visitors, your ads may get dropped.

Originally posted by Dexterity
It isn't hard to get high click-throughs with Google ads. I tried "shareware games" one time and got a 6.5% click-through rate. But for all the Google keywords I tried, the traffic was too expensive and didn't yield enough sales. The unpaid Google listings heavily outpulled the paid listings.


I started experimenting with Google Ad Words back in November. The jury is still out, but so far my normal Google page rank for The Journal (http://www.davidrm.com/thejournal/) pulls more clicks than the Ad Words.

In short: I've not been too happy with the results of the campaign. Based on what I had read, I expected better. You never really know until you try it yourself, though.

-David

I started thinking about this again and I think one of the reasons my campaigns pull their weight is that I am able to target a tiny niche and can thus use very specific keywords. The downside is naturally that it is very difficult to grow my campaigns over a certain size, making AdWords profitable but marginal. However, as they are pulling their weight I am happy to collect any additional awareness I might gather me.