Circus Tribe – Level 1, Lemmings 2
Blimey, it’s carnival time already! I’m afraid I’m being lazy again, mainly because there’s snow outside and I wish to play in it before it melts away. Perhaps one day I’ll be able to make a snowman in a Holodeck, but until then outside will have to do…
L. Waymire presents The Voices of Justin Gross posted at The Shadow Council Strider, saying, “His voice is deep. It resonates lowly. Decisive consonants are articulated from the lips and tongue in a strong, focused way—the kind of focus you expect from someone with an unbreakable will. The British vowels, masculine and noble, demand loyalty of the listener. It is sometimes ruthless. It is a voice undoubtedly familiar with power… That is the voice of actor Justin Gross, as recorded for the hero-turned-villain Arthas in the video game “Warcraft III.” Find out about Gross’s experience working with Blizzard as Arthas, and how he became a voice-over actor in the link above.”
Samuel presents Perfect Dark Zero- An Underrated Classic posted at Game Villa.
Ashton presents The Simpsons: GAME posted at Blogs Blow Dot..
Sutocu presents Halo 3 Review – Xbox posted at ConsoleD.org.
Jenny presents Spent the day on RO posted at the so called me.
Jigsaw hc presents Jigsaw hc’s Rants & Reviews: Tony Hawk Proving Ground Review posted at Jigsaw hc’s Rants & Reviews.
Joe Qelqoth presents Sexual Advice Column: Penile Problems with MegaMan posted at The Cult of Qelqoth, saying, “MegaMan takes time out from blasting humanoids with his arm cannon to answer your serious questions on love, sex and relationships. Reader discretion is strongly advised.”
Jigsaw hc presents Guitar Hero III Battle Mode Tips and Strategies posted at Jigsaw hc’s Rants & Reviews.
Turnip presents Crysis Singleplayer Demo Review posted at Turnip of Power.
Turnip presents Battlefield 3: Things I would like to see improved in the next release from EA Games Turnip of Power: All things to Almonds posted at Turnip of Power.
Kabalyero presents CSI:New York meets Second Life posted at Kabalyero.
Sagar presents Top 25 Ultimate Gamer Vacations posted at Travelhacker.
Samuel presents Nokia N-Gage Returns posted at Game Villa.
Rebecca Wallace-Segall presents When one boy plays video games… he finds inspiration posted at a community of young writers in new york city.
Sarah Aswell presents The Release of Halo 3: A Day of Celebration and Remembering « BROOD posted at BROOD, saying, “my relationship with Halo, from Marathon to the release of Halo 3″
Samuel presents The History Of Arcade Games posted at Game Villa.
As always, a big thanks goes to all the contributors this month. Without your help, it wouldn’t be much of a carnival!
You can submit an article for the next carnival of video game bloggers using the carnival submission form, and view past and previous editions at the blog carnival index page. The next edition is due on the 24th of December, so get cracking on those entries!
Technorati tags: carnival of video game bloggers, blog carnival.
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In part 1 I gave an overview of the experiment and what methods were used. Today I’ll be explaining what happened. Just as refresher, here’s the idea behind this challenge:
“If I had $19.95 to spend on advertising and I had to do everything myself, what would give me the greatest return on investment?”
Results are split into two categories, “paid” and “free”. Where applicable the number of ad impressions and clicks are shown. There are also some exciting charts and analysis at the end too.
Paid Advertising
First up we have the paid advertising, the main focus of this experiment. The total number of hits generated was quite impressive for the amount spent. Sales and newsletter sign-ups were the best I’ve seen whilst the adverts were running, so something must have worked.
Google AdWords
| Total Impressions / Clicks: |
4823 / 66 |
| Clickthrough Rate: |
1.37% |
| Cost Per Click |
$0.18 |
I wasn’t really sure what to expect with AdWords, but I was pleasantly be surprised by the results. The cost per click was a little more than I would have liked, but the clickthrough rate was quite high for a first time ad on some pretty competitive keywords.
First time advertisers must pay a fee to set-up their account, so in effect only $9.95 of the advertising budget actually went on displaying ads.
Project Wonderful
| Total Impressions / Clicks: |
1037451 / 650 |
| Clickthrough Rate: |
0.06% |
| Cost Per Click |
$0.03 |
Project Wonderful use an auction based advertisement model, where the highest bidder has their ads displayed on their chosen slot.
To start with I placed a few manual bids to get a feel for how the site worked. Once I was more comfortable with it, I placed a campaign to last for the rest of the challenge. The campaign feature in Project Wonderful is a massive time saver and is quite comprehensive. Simply enter the criteria for sites you’d like to advertise on, and the system will go out and bid on appropriate slots.
One thing you’ll notice is that you often go under your bid limit. The total amount spent on Project Wonderful was $18.59, so there was a little change left to run a few more slots. Another important thing to note is that the most expensive ads are not always the best. A $3 bid on a rather busy site (icanhascheezburger.com/) only brought in around 30 visits, whereas $0.57 on rpghost.com brought in over 100.
Text Link Ads
| Clicks: |
20 |
| Cost Per Click |
$0.85 |
I use Text Link Ads (affil) to generate revenue, so it seemed only right to try them out from an advertisers point of view. The ad cost $17, and with only 20 visits the cost per click wasn’t very good. To make matters worse, 80% of visitors left without clicking anything else on the site. Oh dear.
Of course, Text Link Ads is (or rather was) more about boosting search engine rankings by getting links for your keywords. Google has recently punished people who place text link adverts on their sites (including myself), so I’m not sure how this model of advertising will continue. In this case it wasn’t really worth the money, as any improvements in the site’s ranking have been wiped out by the latest Page Rank update. Oh well.
StumbleUpon
| Visits: |
281 |
| Cost Per Click |
$0.07 |
Everybody knows the WWW is a huge time waster. StumbleUpon is time wasting on steroids. By entering your interests, StumbleUpon will let you “stumble” onto sites that fit into your likes and dislikes. I use it myself and have found hundreds of new sites I never would have seen otherwise. It’s really worth installing, especially if you have Firefox.
The idea behind StumbleAds is that you pay for “stumbles” from people interested in your site’s theme. Each stumble costs $0.05, and you can set how many will be used each day, which is useful for spreading the server load.
My first try at creating a campaign was rejected for not having enough visitors to send. I found this unusual as I’d submitted it in the “Video Games” section which apparently has around 154,000 subscribers. Changing the site to “Shareware” got it accepted, and I was away. $19.95 would effectively buy 399 visitors, but only 281 showed up in the log. I assume that means a percentage of visitors blog Analytics or JavaScript.
Free Advertising
The free advertising was much harder to measure, as it came from a lot of smaller sources which don’t usually have their own reporting features. The range of traffic was quite varied, with a few surprises as well as a few disappointments.
LinkReferral.com
LinkReferral.com is quite a simple idea. Your site is placed in a directory, and its position within this directory is dependant on how active within the community you are. By visiting other member sites you gain places, which improves your exposure. Writing (good) reviews and helping in the forums also improves your rank. Other members can also review your site so you get feedback.
Naturally it doesn’t work quite like that. Plenty of reviews consist of “Great site link me kthxbye”, and there are a fair few sites which are…below average. Having said that, for the amount of work it’s a good way of getting feedback and a few hits. Some of the reviews are quite useful, and I’ve had a few website errors pointed out by members.
Traffic wise, the bounce rate (number of people leaving without interacting) is about the same as StumbleUpon’s, which isn’t as bad as I was expecting.
Link Bait
Link baiting is the process of crafting articles and content with the deliberate intention to attract a big response. For an idea of what these articles are like, check out the front pages of digg or reddit.
The article that worked for me was “Game Design Lessons: Halo“, and a quick email to the editors at the excellent halo.bungie.org quickly got me over 800 visits. There were also a few referrers from other Halo fan sites as the link spread. Sadly Bungie didn’t visit my house with cake and an Xbox 360, or even and Xbox 360 cake. Maybe next time.
The only other attempt at link bait was the Pirate Week series of posts, which didn’t exactly set the Internet on fire. The Carnival of Video Game Bloggers also brought in a few visitors, but nothing compared to the Halo post.
Flashing Banners
You might have seen the square adverts if you’ve visited Flash arcade websites. Most of them animate far too quickly and include gratuitous flashes of cleavage to grab the viewer’s attention.
I’ll be honest. I ran the ads on this blog for a week and then had to remove them because I felt they were just too horrible. They were generating no traffic and made the place look untidy. I didn’t actually realise that one of the services (moregamers.com) gave out 50,000 free credits after a week of posting, which is where all 190 visits came from. Never again.
Forum Posts
I didn’t exactly go overboard with this technique, but I was still surprised at how poorly it did. I went for a more indirect approach with links in signatures and profiles instead of in actual posts, so perhaps that explains the poor response rate. It’s worth a try, but links need to be promoted a little more.
Blog Comments
:(
The Big Conclusion
Out of all the advertisements, creating link bait brought in the most visitors. However, most of them only stayed for the article and then left so sales weren’t really affected. Project Wonderful brought in lots of traffic from a wide variety of sites, and AdWords had a decent clickthrough rate and brought good visitors.
I promised charts, didn’t I?
Exciting, isn’t it?
And finally, two heat maps from before and after the ad campaign (click for bigger images).
Before
1779 visits / 557 clicks
|
After
3021 visits / 1222 clicks
|
The links to Cute Knight and Aveyond attracted a lot of clicks, especially from visitors referred by More Gamers. It must be the pretty pictures (and the fact that they rock).
So where does this leave things? As someone who’d never advertised online, it was easy to get started and quite nice to watch traffic appear with no more effort once the payment had been made.
One thing that’s worth pointing out is that it’s quite easy to blow a lot of money on advertising and see virtually no return. Different advertisers bring in different visitors, and spending money (or even time) on the wrong audience will quickly drain your resources.
From that perspective, Google AdWords brings in some of the most targeted visitors as they’re already looking for what you’re selling. Project Wonderful brings in a lot of traffic at a very low price, so it’s a great place to get started.
StumbleUpon didn’t perform nearly as well as I would have liked, but the content really wasn’t targeted well for StumbleUpon audience. Individual, focused articles tend to do much better than site front pages. In the past I’ve seen articles bring in thousands of visitors within a few hours, so it’s worth using to get some good exposure.
Text Link Ads were the biggest disappointment for me. The recent Google update hasn’t helped matters, but I did see a slight improvement in my search engine rankings shortly after the ad went live. A few well placed ads might still work for other search engines, but it takes a while for the visitors to show up.
The free advertisers weren’t as bad as expected. LinkReferral.com brings in a trickle of traffic, although the site users are looking for free advertising so may not be the biggest spenders. Some reviews are helpful though, and you may be able to build contacts if offering services and products to webmasters.
I still hate those flashing banners, even though they brought in nearly 200 hits. I really don’t see how they’re worth it for most sites as you have to generate around 100 impressions to get a single click. If you’re getting enough impressions to get a worthwhile amount of visitors from them, you really don’t need the help ;)
Forum posts and blog comments didn’t really do much for the traffic, but they’re easy to make and they may just catch someone’s eye. A few recommendations between friends can do more for your business than any amount of paid advertising.
More business articles: Sodaware.net – Article index
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