FingerBakery Blog

Okay, so now that 2 days have passed since my Admob purchase mentioned in my last post, and I have  seen the sales figures for those 2 days, I think I can write this entry with the results.

First, before I say anything else, I want to make one thing clear, because I feel like a couple of people maybe got the impression that I did this ad buy thinking “woo I’m going to buy $50 of ads and make a profit!”. I said in the first post, I definitely didn’t expect a profitable ROI from this. Just logically it is clear that running this sort of ad can’t really be immediately profitable, because a ton of people have run small ad buys like this in the past, and if they were immediately profitable, all those people would still be doing it, and ramping their buys up to a way bigger scale.

So here is why I personally did it:

My game Pokerbot was released last friday. I know it’s not necessarily the fanciest game in the world with 3D talking robots and online multiplayer options (yet), but I do think it’s a good, fun, solid game that people who are into Texas Holdem and iPhone poker games should like, with some cool and unique features. I used to be my own worst critic, a problem I finally solved by getting married, and I think I’m pretty honest when it comes to self-assessment.

The problem it has right now is that it may not be flashy enough for all the review sites to cover it (we’ll see), even with the extra bonus rounds and ONETIME features and stuff. So as of right now anyway, the game has not had much exposure at all to give it a jumpstart on the charts. It’s hovering inside the top 100 on the card games chart, but it hasn’t had a chance to get up to the top 20 or 10 for a while and see what happens.

For this reason, I think that Pokerbot is somewhat uniquely positioned to get more value from advertising than games that have been out a while and received at least some exposure. I don’t know what percentage of the $50 I will get back in the long term (it’s impossible to measure the true long-term effects), but whatever it is, I think most games would get back much less. (So don’t try this at home fellow developers haha! But really don’t).

Having said all that, let’s hit the numbers: It is hard to be 100% sure of how many direct sales I got through this ad buy. I think there actually is some definitive way to find out with some API that Admob provides where you can stick some of their code in your app (I think people who click your ads have their UDID sent to Admob’s servers and then if they launch your app, the API sends their UDID and Admob can tell they must have purchased the app, or something like that anyway). If I was going to run some huge ad campaign through them, I would use that.

My only way to check the numbers is basically look at the previous couple of days sales, then deduce that any increase kind of has to be from the ads, because nothing else was going on in the past 2 days that would cause a change. I also know a couple of people bought my game because of reading this blog post (THANK YOU!), so I have taken a couple of sales out of the equation.

So it looks like I made about $20 – $25 in immediate sales from this ad buy (not profit, just gross sales). My rank did go up a bit, and most importantly, my position when you search the keyword “poker” in the App Store went way up. It still sucks, but it went from maybe #250 to about #80 and at least it isn’t being beaten by spammy Lady Gaga apps like before. Getting visibility through this keyword is extremely important to me.

I wish I made a bit more of the $50 back (even though I didn’t really expect it to be as high as what it was),  so I could run more ads and chalk up the monetary loss to a promotional cost. If I could run 10 more buys like this and only lose $10 or $15 a time and also know it was making a significant impact on my longer term exposure, it’d be worth it. I don’t think it is though. For now I’m going to go with the more organic marketing methods (hope some reviews come through, let word of mouth build, etc.) and see if Pokerbot gets a bit of exposure that way. I have faith that if create something good, there’s always a chance that it will get the right attention.

So all in all, this experiment did basically turn out as I expected. I never thought I would make a monetary profit, but this is also just the kind of thing that is fun to me, being able to take some of the money the app has made and use it to mess around with stuff like this. It’s not like I was going to use that money to buy a yacht or something!

I’m going to cut off this long entry now, let me know your thoughts in the comments here or my Twitter account (and buy Pokerbot haha).