Originally posted on Medium

In April 2018 I received a gift from Google Ads (aka AdWords) — 2000 rubles (~30$) to spend for my Totem Spirits game advertising.

In this article I want to share some statistics and overall impressions of this platform.

First of all let me tell you that 30$ for advertising is not really ‘a lot of money’ so I didn’t expect it to give the game any significant boost on the market. But the end result was slightly better than I anticipated.

While configuring an ad camping I set the budget to ~0.8$\day expecting it to last one and a half months. Actual campaign was active for almost 4 months. As targeting countries I chose the top 5 countries downloading the game: India, Ukraine, Russia, US and Germany.

The interface of the Google Ads platform is rather intuitive. I wrote rather since it takes some time to find where to press and what is behind all of those statistics and rates. But I can see its improvement over the old AdWords version.

Now it’s time to dive deeper into statistics and numbers.

At the next graph we can see the overview of the whole campaign:

One point represents stats for the whole week

There are two impressions\clicks peaks: week of April 9 and May 7 (I have no clue why). Overall, the campaign is rather linear with ~2500 impressions\~70 clicks per week starting from the peak of May 7 slowly increasing to ~38000 impressions\~500 clicks towards the end.

At the next graph we can see the conversion stats:

1$ is roughly 62 rubles at this very moment

The cost of one conversion is just 9 cents! Conversion rate is 7.84% which is actually quite high for the industry.

Now let’s look into Google Play Console stats:

Google Play Console Installs stats

As we can see the numbers match: 365 installs with top 18 installs per day several times. Unfortunately, no other relevant statistics can be gathered from Console, since there were no ratings\purchases :(

So far the promotion of the game is the hardest part in the whole Game Development process (see my previous article about games promotion for free). And paid advertising seems like a right way to go on.

In the end I’d like to quote Mark Twain:

Quote

Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.