Here's an experience with advertising on Facebook from the perspective of someone who's never done any advertising before. Actually someone who doesn't have a product to sell yet either!
This was my very first time paying for an advertisement. It got me familiar with it's workings and I have a better grasp of what's going on now. My GoDaddy account net me a bunch of advertising credit on Google AdWords and Facebook so I decided to use it as a learning experience rather than risk having the coupons expire. This gives me a hint at what I'll be in for when I get an advertising budget.
Have a look at what I saw and what I learned below.
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I started by choosing a goal. The choices were download an app, click to website, like a page, participate in post, and purchase product along with other things. I could have linked it o TriGrid (my only app linked to Facebook) for some downloads, but I really do consider that behind me. I'd rather have people interested in game development take a look at my website than have them play TriGrid for a few minutes. My blog shows what I'm currently doing, which is an exciting first big project. That's the app I want to sell to people. All my other ones were a warm up for this.
Next I chose pictures to use in the randomly generated news feed posts. I used a bunch of images that represent what you'll see on this site. Lots of Yotes logos, downloads charts, and Unicorn Quest screenshots.
I got to see what they will look like along with a short description of the website. I put it in third person because it's an ad so it's not really me talking to the reader. When I started to write the sentence in first person it didn't feel right at all. It felt kinda forced.
With the look of the ad finalized I selected the demographics I was after. I chose people in school of all ages interested in things like video games, entrepreneurship, and game development. There was a scale indicator saying it was too niche and that I should aim for a broader audience. I played around with my selections but it didn't seem to change. Here I thought it was good narrowing it down to the kind of people who like the material would work best for an ad. People who like video games or game development seemed like a perfect choice. I even threw in people who like start ups in general too.
I'm wondering if the demographic options assume that the target audience is interested in all the demographics listed and not at least one of them like I think it does. There was no indication of that in the instructions and there was a checklist of a bunch of categories with subcategories with the number of people interested in each one.
The coupon was $50 and I plan to use every cent. Considering how many big companies put ads on Facebook, I doubt $50 will get me far. I chose to show the ads in mainly north America and the default English speaking countries. I chose to run the ads on July, 5 days at $10 a day. I'm not sure how the ads will be displayed for everyone and I know there is a bidding system involved, but I just stuck with the default options.
Now it's just a matter of waiting for them to go live and study what happens. It should be interesting and I may get to deliver content to more people interested in my project and how games work.
This is only the Facebook ad-rush though and it's really a test to see how it all works before putting my own money into it. I'll save the Google ads for after I see how this turns out. I don't know when or if these expire (I keep getting emails saying to use them soon) but I'd like to hold onto that until close to beta time where I'll be asking people to playtest for me.
So keep a lookout for my ads which are due to pop up on Facebook July 8th-13th. That's when I plan to have a trailer for Unicorn Quest and be contacting journalists for game previews. Taking advantage of the post-E3 news drought and lack of big titles being released. If I stay on schedule there will be a lot to show off by then.
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If you liked this post you can follow my great adventure from dreamer to developer
at yotesgames.com where I post my progress and lessons daily.
- Tony Yotes
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