Google Ad Words

Today I started the Google Ad Words ad for Monster Cache.  That means that it will be running during the comic show.  I really didn't want to do that because I wanted to be able to tell how many people signed up as a result of the comic show vs. how many sign up as a result of the Google ad.  Now it might be hard to tell them apart.  But the reason I did it now is because Google sent me an offer for a free extra $150 credit if I signed up by this weekend and then spend $50.  That seemed too good to pass up.

One thing I did to try to tell marketing efforts apart is I added a feature to accept promotional codes as the Referral Code.  Before, Referral Codes were just for other people. Now I can make one for a marketing campaign, so as long as people use the code when they register, then I'll be able to tell how they heard about the game.

The way Google Ad Words works is you "bid" on how much you will pay if someone clicks on your ad.  They give you a suggested bid based on what other advertisers are paying for the same key words, and my suggested bid was $0.85.  So that's approximately 250 clicks for $200.  Hard to imagine that we would make $200 back from 250 people, but for now its just about getting people to use it, and hopefully word will spread from there.  You can also set a max spending amount per day, and I set mine at $3, so that means it should run for at least 60 days.

I've been disappointed that nobody new has shown up on the Legends board all week.  And also paranoid that something was broken.  So 2 nights ago I asked my neighbor to sign up.  She did and caught 1 monster, so now we have 38 on the Legends board.  There are actually 138 records in the table of registered users.  So what's going on with the other 100?  Many of those are our test accounts.  But lots of people sign up and then never catch a monster.  Makes me wonder if they don't understand how to play it, that you have to actually walk to the monster.  And some people start the registration but never finish it by clicking the link in their email.  In some cases that's because they incorrectly entered their email address, like with an accidental space added.  I think I'm going to work next on a way to resend those emails if I can tell where the typo is and fix it.