Facebook Ad

Back in March of 2013, I ran a Google ad for Monster Cache.  I had a $150 coupon if I spent $50, or in other words, $200 worth of advertising for $50.  That $200 only got me about 20 signups as far as I could tell.  So roughly $10 per signup, which is horrible.

A couple weeks ago I got a coupon from Facebook for $50 advertising credit without having to spend anything.  So I started a Facebook ad yesterday.  It works very similarly to a Google ad.  You set a daily budget, you give it keywords and other parameters to target your audience, and it charges you per impression based on how "valuable" your target audience is, or something like that.  I set my daily budget at $10/day, which I think is considered laughably low :-)  But I'm not in a hurry and I want to see how it works before spending a bunch.  So far I have spent $18 and about 16 people have signed up.  That's just over $1 per signup, or about 10 times better than Google!  Its' also resulted in 3 Facebook page likes, and 18 people who like my Facebook advertisement itself, LOL.

I'm also finding that the Facebook Ad Manager is easier to understand and navigate than the Google ads.  I originally uploaded 2 images.  It created 4 separate ads: one for the News Feed and one for the Right Column for each image.  Of those original four ads, only one seemed to be getting many clicks -- the one with the large image in the News Feed.  The others had used up $2 with no results, the large image in the News Feed had used up $16.  Surprisingly, most of the signups it generated were in our European countries, not the US.  So I took the good ad and split it into two more -- one for US only and one for Europe only.  Now I want to see if the European ad clicks might be cheaper, so maybe I can get the price down to less money per sign up. (UPDATE: Turns out the European ones were more expensive).

Here's a screen shot of what my ads look like now:

Azure CPU spike all Sunday afternoon and evening

The Monster Cache server is hosted on Microsoft Windows Azure.  I made that decision for a few reasons:

1. Initially I was just going to use my existing Lanitek server, but I have another important web site running there, GPRA Upload.  Once I had an issue on Monster Cache where I wasn't closing some database connections and it brought down not only Monster Cache, but GPRA Upload too.  That convinced me to get Monster Cache its own server.
2. At the time, I had just recently attended a seminar on Windows Azure, so I guess I was curious to try it out.  And they were offering a 90 day free-trial (or maybe it was 180 day?), so that was good since we were several months away from being ready to launch.
3. I had, and maybe still do have, a hope that if Google or Apple ever promote the game then there will be a spike in traffic, and then I could easily increase the server capabilities on a short-term basis, if needed.

I haven't been super happy with Windows Azure for these reasons:

1. Its more complicated to use than a normal web server.  Some things that took extra time that I can think of off-hand are web Sessions, file uploading, and making backups.
2. They keep changing the features. When I signed up, they had pretty decent tech support.  Now you have to pay extra for tech support, with the minimum plan being an extra $29 / month
3. It hasn't worked perfectly, I've had a couple instances of long down time that I consider their fault.

One instance of down time was yesterday.  I noticed in the afternoon that my Monster Cache app wouldn't log in, but I thought it was my phone's issue.  When I tried the web site at 9 pm that night, I found the web site wasn't even coming up, but just failing to respond.  I started looking for support options, and that's when I found that  I no longer had tech support, just billing support.  So then I looked for a way to "reboot" the app, since there isn't really a lone server to reboot.  That's when I found the CPU monitoring tool.  It showed that Monster Cache had been using 86% CPU since mid-afternoon.  Here's their chart:

That was very strange since I know that our traffic is VERY low, like only dozens to hundreds of hits per day.  There was an option to reboot an instance of a role.  I only have one instance, so I rebooted it at about 10 pm.  You can see that the CPU went back down to 0% and its been working fine so far today.

Monster Cache European Launch

Once Apple approved the latest Monster Cache version on iOS, we were ready to launch in Europe!  I'd already generated all the monsters a couple months ago or so.  I tried to use about the same monsters / square mile proportions as the U.S..  But when using the monster viewer, it still seemed like there were too many empty patches, so I added a lot more level 1 monsters than my initial calculations (And around the same time I generated another million level 1 monsters for the U.S., to try to reduce empty spots in U.S. as well).

To do the launch, I just went into the app configuration areas in both Android and iOS and selected all the new countries in which I wanted to release.  It was pretty much that easy, after all the other preparations had been made in the application itself.  Oh yeah, I also had to add the new countries to our "Supported Countries" table in the database so that they would show up on the registration form for people to indicate where they are from.

Next was promoting it.  I only had two leads there.

1. When we first made the beta and the Vimeo video a year ago, a German blogger had found Monster Cache and blogged about it.   Unfortunately, Monster Cache wasn't ready for Germany at that time.  Now that it was, I tried to comment on that blog post to let them know, but the comment never got approved.
2. As a result of that post, 3 German people had signed up a year ago during that beta.  I had had to email them to tell them we weren't ready for Germany.  So now I was able to email them again and let them know it was ready!  But I didn't hear back from any, nor did it seem like any started playing.

Even though both of those ideas seemed to fail, we started getting sign-ups from Germany and the UK.  As it stands now, we have 9 German players on the Legends board, and one from the UK.  Current Legend board total is 172 players with 2693 monsters found.  And we got our first German In App Purchase too.

Here is the full list of European countries for which I generated monsters and released the app, along with their approximate square miles, which I think I got from Wikipedia.  The countries I chose were essentially based on wanting to get the biggest Western European countries and then including other countries that fell within the large box that bounded all of those.  Not sure why Apple did not provide the capability to release in Boznia and Herzegovina.

UK	94060
Ireland	32595
Spain	194897
Portugal	35655
France	211209
Germany	137847
Belgium	13120
Netherlands	16485
Switzerland	15943
Austria	32383
Italy	116304
Slovenia	7819
Croatia	21829
Czech Republic	30365
Boznia and Herzegovina	19741	Android only