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AppGameKit Classic Chat / Review Sites (Paid and Free)

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Funnell7
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Posted: 5th Mar 2014 13:03
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We are currently looking into review sites (both paid and free) to try and generate some more exposure for our apps.

I feel the free ones are generally a waste of time as they rarely get round to actually reviewing your app (most sites say they get to review about 1-5% of all app submissions). I'd be interested to know if anyone has any success stories with paid review sites or any recommendations?

Thanks!
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bjadams
AGK Backer
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Posted: 5th Mar 2014 13:05
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what kind of app?
app for kids? game? productivity app?

you need to advertise on target sitess
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Funnell7
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Posted: 5th Mar 2014 13:59
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All good questions... But that would make this thread very specific. If you know of any sites or have any suggestions for specific genres feel free to share. Sharing all experiences regardless of app type will ensure this thread serves well for the entire community.

But since you ask, for me specifically, its Games, all ages...
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xCept
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Posted: 5th Mar 2014 18:29
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Unfortunately, most of the review sites these days ask for money in order to provide a review and the ones that don't only seem to pick very popular apps to review or a few randomly. Many of the most popular app sites don't even accept review requests but pick and choose as they wish.

The only site that I've found any success with is AppAdvice. I never submitted a review request but one of my apps was reviewed and published there three times over a couple years. The site is popular enough that when I made an app free for a short time it received enough downloads via AppAdvice promotion to reach the top 10 Free Entertainment apps on iTunes (85,000 to 100,000 downloads in a day beating out HBO, A&E and others).

Stay away from those that charge money IMHO. I got suckered into a couple of those video review sites a few years ago, including DailyAppShow, and spent over $500. They are scam sites promising so many tweets and views but it is all fake bot traffic.
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bjadams
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Posted: 5th Mar 2014 22:35 Edited at: 5th Mar 2014 22:35
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I would suggest this site, as I used it myself in the past but it's not for games and only for iOS (that's why i asked what type of app)

https://www.facebook.com/MostUsefulIPhoneAppOfTheDay
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Naphier
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Location: St Petersburg, Florida
Posted: 5th Mar 2014 22:59 Edited at: 5th Mar 2014 23:01
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Game dev help spreadsheet

Originally from this article

This sheet is AWESOME. We've reached out to a number of devs and journalists and had fair success. I'm not sure how many in total we've reached out to, but we've been covered on about a dozen sites. Unfortunately, most of them are pretty small and haven't brought in a lot of new users, but it gives us exposure and quotes to put on our press page so that future press will see that some sites have reviewed it.

Next I'd highly suggest making sure that you have a pressKit page set up.
dopresskit.com
It's pretty easy to set up and puts your information into a format that press is accustomed to seeing. This makes it really easy for them to give you coverage as they can just copy a bit of information directly from your press page. Ours can be seen here.
www.Wordspionage.com/press

Next up... the wonderful paid reviews. There are so many! And we've got someone reaching out to us at least once a day trying to get us to do it. We've examined some that have been extremely overpriced and when talking to us they have false information (one said we only had 50 downloads another said we had no video...). Anyway... we're soon experimenting with some and I'll try to remember to touch base here with any results.

We've also tried a number of different ad networks. They all stink. They tell us that we get tons of impressions and tons of clicks, but the install rate that we've observed on our end has been weak. It could be that a word game is just that difficult to market, but we think they're fairly worthless unless you spend a lot of money. And at the point where you're paying more to acquire a user than a user is worth to you then you just can't do it.

We've had a most of our advertising success running Facebook boosts. When targeting friends and friends of friends it has been the best. Targeting specific demographics has lead to a lot of clicks, but not a good install rate for the price.

It would be great if we could have a topic like this stickied so that everyone over time can chime in with their own experiences. I know that Easter Bunny has had some fairly successful download rates and I'm not sure how he/she is doing it. It could just simply be that he/she is making games that have a strong appeal in today's market.

PS - I'd also highly highly suggest that everyone in the forums makes sure that their posts have a signature to your website or games so that we can easily find out what each other is doing. Otherwise you can't find what apps you've published...

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easter bunny
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Posted: 5th Mar 2014 23:08 Edited at: 5th Mar 2014 23:25
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I'd recommend making a Playboard page. Make a playboard with a few popular apps of the same genre and putting your app as #1


Edit, and you can also make yourself a http://tapfame.com/ page for a portfolio if you want


Audacia Games - Facebook
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Digital Awakening
AGK Developer
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Posted: 5th Mar 2014 23:26
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I've had some success posting my game at the TIGSource forums. One guy did a Youtube video and I got mentioned on IndieGames.com. Not much but then it's just a pre-alpha build.

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Naphier
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Posted: 1st Apr 2014 20:08
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Here's some results from Android Headlines:
$120 for the review
52 downloads.
CPI over $2
Now, bear in mind that a word game is extremely difficult to market.
So that CPI isn't horrible - it certainly isn't optimal for us, but is about in-line with all other advertising we've done.
There were added bonuses from it other than the installs.
The review was well-written and the reviewer actually took time to play the game (as do most with Wordspionage which is spectacular because it can take days to get a feel for it since it is turn based multiplayer). Also it was nice to get a 4.5 out of 5 rating from them which is the highest rating I've seen on their site (but many others are 4/5).
It gives us yet another excellent quote for our site, store description, and press page.
So all-in-all I'd have to say it was worth it.
I imagine that if you have an arcade/platform style game you want reviewed then you'll have much higher CTR.
Also, the quality of the players we got from their seems to be better than through our other ads. Over 50% are playing multiple games and remain in our DAU pool. Our typical install-to-active user rate is around 25% (meaning they stick around for more than a couple of days).

Ultimately, it is very hard marketing a word game and will be a long road to success for us. In the meantime I'm working on other games that I can quickly produce to help us earn a bit more and get more notice.
With that said, if you have a framework for a game then reuse it if you can. Toss together multiple variations (Happy Chick - Slippy Penguin - Albatross Dive , etc). One thing I'm learning is that we really really need to produce a lot of games.

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Funnell7
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Posted: 7th Apr 2014 00:46 Edited at: 7th Apr 2014 00:47
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Some useful info, I appreciate it... We had a little go (£50) at an AdMob Banner Campaign, that was interesting to say the least. I'll provide all the details about it tomorrow in a new thread for anyone that's interested...
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Ched80
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Location: Peterborough, UK
Posted: 8th Apr 2014 20:07
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This is a really useful thread! Cheers guys, I've just finished my first app so I'm just heading out into this dirt of thing. It's amazing how invisible your game feels! Especially after putting so much love into it.

I honestly have no idea where to start do this thread is really interesting to me!

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Naphier
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Posted: 8th Apr 2014 20:10
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I'd start with a press kit if you have a site to install/host it on.
Next step is the google doc with all of the websites/press people.
All of this stuff would be a nightmare for me if I didn't have my wife doing it!
Paid advertising seems to really stink unless you have a solid amount of money to put into it

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Funnell7
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Posted: 8th Apr 2014 20:13
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Quote: "Paid advertising seems to really stink unless you have a solid amount of money to put into it "


Naphier, is that talking from experience? I'd love to hear your stinky story. We are currently looking for some 'Paid Advertising' options sites so would be good to know of any experiences you may have had.

As mentioned in my last post, we already tried a Campaign on AdMob and that really stank too (albeit only £50)!
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Naphier
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Posted: 8th Apr 2014 20:34
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We've just had poor luck compounded with the difficulty of marketing a game that is easily seen as just another word game...
AdMob we had CTR of about 1% and CPI of over $2.
Facebook is running an average of 1.23% CTR and CPI is running well over $3.
Millenial Media had about 0.4% CTR
Paid review on Android Headlines ($120) a little under $2 per install.
All of the install data is estimated because we can only track links. AdMob gave an actual conversion rate, but I think it was complete BS. Reason being is that we could count our installs at that time and they were saying we had like 50 installs from clicks, but for the period of the campaign we only had like 25 installs according to the Google Play developer console (our actual numbers were bigger, but the ratio was similar).

We ran a Reddit ad and that was a whopping 0.06% CTR.

Facebook has been the most successful. I think a lot of it has to do with the way that ads are presented. They look very organic and are inline with the news feed now.

Unfortunately unless you're willing to spend over $100/day you're not going to get much notice. It seems you have to expect a Cost Per Install of over $1 which is not really sustainable for most games.
At this point we're starting to focus on building games that are less intellectual than something like a word game with extra strategy. We're also working on ways to get people revved about WS when they first launch the game (training , quick matches).

The majority of the market desires short, simple games where no thinking is involved. Either that or extremely stellar games where the graphics and gameplay are so stunning that it takes tens of thousands of dollars to make it.

So we're hoping for success on some of our simpler titles which we hope will lead to more success and notice for WS. At this point we have to stop campaigning ads because they're just not effective enough

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xGEKKOx
AGK Master
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Posted: 8th Apr 2014 20:59 Edited at: 8th Apr 2014 21:01
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Why don't you use AdMob or iAD.
Google called me personally asking me to port all my apps under Android.
They think that i can earn about 4000/8000$ from AdMob CPM.
Doing this change i will lose a month, so i will not change it on iOS, but i will add AdMob only when AppGameKit will work for me too on Android.

For the moment i'm ok with iAD, i'm spending about 2000$/month and i'm earning the same amount from iAD. So it is a circle.

For me Apple iAD are better than AdMob, because the control panel is great.
The AdMob one is really confused, seems done by a teenager...

Anyway, the best way to do advertising, is iAD and AdMob.
My downloads since the advertising is raised by 200%.

Ah...
If you have 1 app, don't use advertising, is useless, instead if you have more than 50 apps it have sense. You can do cross marketing trough apps and for sure 1 of them will raise in the shop ranking.

Long life to Steve!
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Naphier
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Posted: 8th Apr 2014 21:06
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Quote: "AdMob we had CTR of about 1% and CPI of over $2."

We don't have $2,000 per month to throw into ads.

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Funnell7
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Posted: 8th Apr 2014 22:12
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Quote: "We don't have $2,000 per month to throw into ads."


Same here lol...

The £50 we invested in AdMob as an experiment, resulted in 2,400,000 ad impressions, 4066 clicks, and (according to AdMobs tracking) 27 downloads. So that works out at about a £1.85 CPI, for a Free App! Won't be doing that again, lol...
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Satchmo
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Posted: 9th Apr 2014 00:26
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Crazy how 2.5 million impressions leads to only 27 downloads. Makes me want to stay away from advertising my games.

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