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I wouldn't recommend adwords, they're not cost effective for what you're doing. Reddit's probably worth a shot, especially at the "we're looking for feedback" s

by ig1 15y ago

I wouldn't recommend adwords, they're not cost effective for what you're doing. Reddit's probably worth a shot, especially at the "we're looking for feedback" stage. You should also be A/B testing everything, from your front page to the emails you're sending out to bloggers. Test radically different messages and see how they work out, try offering free licences for bloggers to give away. Comparing yourself to other products is an approach that works well, "Ever wanted Shoot'Em-Up Construction Kit for the web ?", etc. might work well. Also don't be afraid to look at what competing products are doing to promote themselves and doing the same things. You should get feedback from your users as well, consider installing something like kissinsight and emailing users a few weeks after they've downloaded it to get feedback. Have you looked at the analytics for your search box to see what people are looking for ? Something else you might want to consider is why not remove the technical limits from the free version but instead just insert a promo for your tool into the game ("this game was constructed with x") and include a link back to your homepage. Lack of publicity is more likely to kill you than anything else, if someone writes a popular game with the free version then the promotional value of that is worth far more than the $30 you'd get from a sale.

TomGullen 15y ago
Thanks for the advice! We have ~£100 of free AdWords credit so might as well use it, see if we can get any value out of it. I'm curious why you think Adwords isn't cost effective though? I've heard this before and find it hard to believe (but then again my experience of running ad campaigns is minimal!) We have identified a couple of techniques our competitors used effectively and fairly cheaply so are going to explore those as well. Search was one of our weaknesses, but I did a lot of reading on SEO and think I applied it pretty well (technical aspect), we're starting to see results from that but it's a slow process :) We did explore a lot of options about technical limits/nag screens etc, we are going to be tweaking it and seeing what works and what doesn't! A/B testing landing pages is a great idea. I am keeping close track of it on Analytics and making small tweaks here and there constantly, we got the bounce rate from ~50% down to 25% which is good.
- ig1 15y ago
  Back of an envelope calculation, assuming a CPC of $1 and a conversion rate of 1% (say 10% download your app and 10% of those decide to purchase) it'll cost you $100 to make a $30 sale. You can plug your actual numbers in to give you a better estimate though. For search have a look at the data, use google adwords tool to figure out how many people search for the terms you're targeting and check out how competitive those terms are. Remember even the top ranked search term only gets 20% of the clicks from that search and it drops rapidly as you go down the page.

by ig1 15y ago

TomGullen 15y ago

Thanks for the advice! We have ~£100 of free AdWords credit so might as well use it, see if we can get any value out of it. I'm curious why you think Adwords isn't cost effective though? I've heard this before and find it hard to believe (but then again my experience of running ad campaigns is minimal!) We have identified a couple of techniques our competitors used effectively and fairly cheaply so are going to explore those as well. Search was one of our weaknesses, but I did a lot of reading on SEO and think I applied it pretty well (technical aspect), we're starting to see results from that but it's a slow process :) We did explore a lot of options about technical limits/nag screens etc, we are going to be tweaking it and seeing what works and what doesn't! A/B testing landing pages is a great idea. I am keeping close track of it on Analytics and making small tweaks here and there constantly, we got the bounce rate from ~50% down to 25% which is good.

ig1 15y ago
Back of an envelope calculation, assuming a CPC of $1 and a conversion rate of 1% (say 10% download your app and 10% of those decide to purchase) it'll cost you $100 to make a $30 sale. You can plug your actual numbers in to give you a better estimate though. For search have a look at the data, use google adwords tool to figure out how many people search for the terms you're targeting and check out how competitive those terms are. Remember even the top ranked search term only gets 20% of the clicks from that search and it drops rapidly as you go down the page.