Aww. Oh well, it had to happen some day. Today was my first not-5-star rating day – one 4, and one 1. I guess I should be happy that my first 29 ratings were all 5 stars.
This seems like a good time to do a ‘How is it doing?’ kind of post.
Downloads
The overall growth of the game hasn’t been too bad.
I’m using different version numbers for Google, Amazon, and everyone else. It still needs to be approved on Amazon. Right now I’m at about 75% users from Google, 25% from 3rd-party stores. I’ve listed it on my usual stores – AppChina, SlideME, GetJar, etc. I didn’t create individual version numbers for each store, so I can’t really track which ones are doing well, which ones are lying on their dashboards, etc. And I don’t really care, I just wanted some sense of Google vs. Amazon vs. 3rd party.
Rankings
The game has been slowly climbing in the charts, it’s at 226 today on ‘Top New Free’ for ‘Arcade & Action’. I see iOS developers posting charts by country, I don’t know if there’s a way to do that with Android games. I’d be curious to see how it’s doing in India 
Distimo shows me ranking data for all my other games, but not Neil Rajah. Not sure if it needs more time to collect that data, or if I forgot to enable some setting.
Marketing
I’ve had a couple of blogs review or mention the game, and a few mentions on Twitter. A couple of people kinda-sorta indicated that they might review it, but I haven’t seen any reviews yet. Not sure if it’s worth nagging them. Maybe after a few more days. I put out a press release through a couple of sites, and those got picked up on various news aggregators etc., but I’m not sure how many people read them. Most of the emails sent to bloggers didn’t get any responses, which seems to be the norm.
I’m still running Neil Rajah ads 100% on my other games, so I’ve had zero revenue from them. Bus Jumper still gets 70-100 clicks a day on the Neil Rajah ad, so I’ll probably keep doing this until those clicks die down. One problem is, my ad links to the Google store, but I have no idea if it’s an Amazon user or SlideME user that clicked on the ad. Would be cool if I could create ads with different target links and target them correctly, but that seems impossible.
I’m also running an AdWords campaign with a coupon I got. There was some confusion with getting the ad approved, so it went live yesterday. I have a $5 daily limit, and I got about 30 clicks yesterday, paying about 4c per click. Like I’ve said earlier, I don’t think this makes sense for a free app, but with free money, I have nothing to lose.
Monetization
This is pretty disappointing so far. I’m getting 3-6k impressions and 100-150 clicks per day, which is about what Bus Jumper was doing last month. The interstitial ad at the end of the levels seems to be working, the CTR on that is higher than the banners. But the payouts are abysmal. For instance, yesterday I got 110 clicks and 39 cents, which is about a third of a cent per click. That’s ridiculous. There are many ad companies with several clicks and zero revenue, so I’m hoping that the data will catch up. Since this is a new app that just started serving impressions, maybe it takes some time for the reporting machinery to spin up? No idea. It’s also the start of a quarter, and my understanding is that this is the time when marketing budgets are the lowest, so maybe this is how it’s going to be. Sucks.
I added a LeadBolt offer wall to the game. It’s off a ‘More Apps’ link in the main menu. This just went out yesterday, so it’s too early to tell, but so far, no clicks. I’m guessing that you need to be more in-your-face with this if you want to make money at it, and then you start pissing off customers. Which doesn’t seem worth it to me. But we’ll see, maybe some people do click on passive menu buttons like that. Time will tell. If it doesn’t work, I may just take it out completely, instead of doing something like launching the offer wall when they exit the app, or something along those lines.
You should check out the free tracking through Distimo Monitor that will show you ranking breakdowns by country and lots of other useful details for multiple marketplaces and ad networks. It’s a great way to monitor all of that stuff in one dashboard and in a daily email, and it’s super simple to set up. Sounds like I’m a shill, but it’s been helpful for us in the past and I though I should pass on the word if you aren’t already using their service!
I’ve been using Distimo for a few months now. I see ranking data for my other games, but Neil Rajah doesn’t show up as an option on the Rankings page yet. Not sure why. I agree, it’s a pretty handy service.
Update: Today all my Mobclix earnings numbers went to 0, so I checked their dashboard, and there’s a notice from the 6th about issues with reporting revenue. I think they decided to take down all numbers until this got fixed, instead of showing partial numbers. Hopefully this gets resolved soon, and the actual revenue from the interstitial ads turns out to be higher than what it’s seemed.
When you way interstitial ads you mean on TapJoy?
I cheer for you!
No, the interstitial ads are on Mobclix. Here’s everything that’s in the game right now:
* LeadBolt, tied to a ‘More Apps’ option on the main menu. If you click that, I launch an activity with a LeadBolt URL, which opens up in a browser
* Mobclix banner ads – Shown on every menu screen at the top of the screen. Disabled when you’re playing a level
* Mobclix interstitial ads – This is a 320×250 ad that is shown every time you complete a level, before you get to see your score. It comes up centered on the screen, and I’ve put a ‘skip’ button on the bottom right which will take you to the score screen
* Tapjoy – I don’t use this directly, but if you open up the Swarm activity and you want to buy Swarm Coins, one of the options that Swarm gives you is to accept some TapJoy offers
When I describe it this way, it feels like the game has more advertising than gameplay
But in reality, I think I’ve put some thought into keeping things reasonable, and not be too annoying.
And… I got my first review which complains about too much advertising
I’ve planned on having an ad-free version, but I think I need to add some more content to that, like the random challenge mode that some people have suggested. I also have to figure out how I want to handle that:
* Make that a separate app (How to share game progress? I expect people will be pissed if they have to play through all the levels again)
* Some kind of paid download that unlocks a key (Security? What happens if buyer installs, then uninstalls and asks for a refund? Maybe the unlocker app needs to stay installed, and responds to a broadcast intent or something?)
* Use the Swarm store to provide a purchasable upgrade that removes ads
* Use a LeadBolt ‘content unlocker’ (not really sure how that works)
… or something else.
I dont find that this is too much advertising, because advertising is visible only during breaks and others ads are not visible or not so visible. I wondered why TapJoy working so bad in your case and now I understand, these ads becomes visible only if player go to buy something from shop.
Tnx for your details I will go now before you ban me from blog for … ever.
P.S.
Do not own an android phone and that is a main reason why I dont know anything about your app but you can count on one 5* review when put my hands on one, very soon.
LOL! Not much point in having a blog if I ban people for asking questions
Thanks for the compliments!
Check this one, looks promising on the one hand but on the other hand I do not see anywhere do they charge this?
http://www.hookedmediagroup.com
Looks interesting. I’ve seen many other apps / services that try to do the same thing – help a user find good apps / games in the Google market, because the basic market interface is so horrible for that. Hard to decide which one to go with.
You’d think a company like Google would be able to implement a good search / discovery interface for the marketplace
I noticed that Google rarely showing paid apps, even when I searching them with exact name. Personally, I think that this is not a failure but a consciously designed move, after all Google build up empire on ads not on paid content.
My opinion is that you can not rely on natural growth on the contrary you have to catch up new users. So its maybe not a bad idea to apply your app to the service that recommending users to install the application based on the personal activities of users. Point is to find free of charge service which offer this, do you know any? I found this one, but I do not like it because I can not find is it free or not.
I think OpenFeint, Scoreloop and Swarm all have some kind of ‘find more games’ option, and users can rate games, recommend to friends, etc. HeyZap is an SDK and service that focuses on building a social network around games, recommendations, check-ins when you play a game, etc. Those are the ones I’ve looked at in some detail, I think I’ve seen websites of more services in a similar space.
Inspiring work you’ve done. I hope to someday get to that level. I have made 1.19 so far for our terrible “blog companion” app haha.
Thanks. Hey, I remember when I earned my first dollar as a game developer. Keep working at it
“One problem is, my ad links to the Google store, but I have no idea if it’s an Amazon user or SlideME user that clicked on the ad.”
You can create one different app id in your ad provider of choice for every market you support and generate one APK for each of them. Then you can setup different house ads with different referral link parameters (like utm_source=amazon) and target them accordingly.
Best success
Johannes
That’s true, if I had set up the game that way, separate APK files with separate Mobclix IDs, that would have worked. There might be downsides to that though, because now every app will register fewer impressions / clicks, and I think some of the ad agencies look at that when deciding what ads to run in your app.
With Bus Jumper I used the same APK for pretty much everything. With Neil Rajah I’m using different APKs with different version numbers, but everything else is the same, so all impressions will go to the same app ID in Mobclix.
Hope the payouts pick up. It’s a fun game so far
Thanks. I’m glad you like the game. And I hope the payouts pick up too