

Advertising an Android game: Facebook vs. AdMob - Macacity
http://www.war-worlds.com/blog/2014/01/advertising-an-android-game-facebook-vs-admob

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sriramk
I work at Facebook on the mobile app ads team.

Like a lot of other commenters here, I think the OP didn't run an mobile app
install ad which is meant exactly for this scenario - which would show up only
on mobile inside newsfeed.

OP - would love to help out and dig in further. Can you email me (I'm
sriramk@fb.com)?

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georgiecasey
what's the general CPI you're seeing for US users on facebook atm? i know this
can vary hugely, but a ballpark figure would be nice

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SeoxyS
I'm not sure what makes the OP think that you can run a conclusive experiment
with a $20 ad budget… you're not going to get any conclusive numbers out of
that. With click-through-rate and install-rate both typically in the low
single digits, you're likely to get, if you're lucky, a handful of install for
a thousand impression. In order to have a sample size big enough to make
conclusive statements like this, you'd need at least 500 installs - ie. an ad
budget of $1,000 for each network.

Disclaimer: I work at Chartboost, now the largest mobile gaming ad network.

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codeka
That may be true, but I _did_ get a noticeable increase in install rate with
the AdMob campaign, with the same budget.

With a bigger budget, I might have been able to get more of a boost from
Facebook, but I'm an indie developer and I really don't have the time or
budget to spend hours and hundreds of $ tweaking a campaign.

~~~
SeoxyS
I think you're missing my point. I wasn't trying to say that the ROI would be
better on Facebook with a bigger budget (though, I guess anything is greater
than 0%). I'm saying that your budget is too small to make the numbers you're
seeing anything else than statistically insignificant luck.

Imagine taking a coin toss and trying to figure out whether heads or tails
came up more often, but only tossing the coin three times. Imagine you get
HHT, and conclude that head is a better bet than tails.

This is essentially what you're doing, by concluding that one option is better
than the other, based on a single-digit install sample size.

Now, I'm not saying you should be spending massive ad budgets, and spending a
lot of time tweaking your campaigns, I'm merely pointing out that you don't
have enough raw data to make conclusive judgements about the effectiveness of
these two networks.

Being a major player in this industry, I can tell you that the numbers I'm
seeing seem to indicate that Facebook (and Chartboost) are in fact much more
effective ways to buy installs for mobile games than AdMob, with a properly
set up campaign. Feel free to contact me directly if you'd like more insight
regarding this.

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mjmahone17
Why did you buy desktop ads to try to get mobile installs? Of course you're
going to get a ton of impressions and hardly any actual installs: no one
browses Facebook's desktop site via their android phone, and people on desktop
aren't looking to install an app.

Also, your Google ad is significantly better looking than your Facebook ad,
and is also much more likely to be seen while people are on their mobile
phones.

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xxbondsxx
Not to mention the complete lack of conversion tracking. He's measuring
success of the mobile app ad by monitoring game activity WoW which is
laughably unscientific.

Facebook supports conversion pixels as well, so conversions through his signup
flow could have been measured. Instead we just get a vague disappointment in
WoW signups

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calbear81
If you install the Facebook SDK, you get to track conversions directly.

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mathrawka
Only if you use a "partner" analytic service. If you use your own, or a 3rd
party like Mixpanel, you cannot track where an install comes from.

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captainchaos
It's hard to tell from the included screenshots, but both based on the
dimensions of the Facebook Ad (it looks like a "Right Hand Rail" ad and not
one that run in the newsfeed) and the fact that a Mobile App Install statistic
was not provided, I think its fairly likely that the Facebook Ad in question
might not have been the Mobile App Install [1] format. That type of ad can be
targeted only to people who are consuming Facebook via the Facebook client for
your desired Mobile OS (in this case Android) and the call to action will be
direct install. It will also indicate precisely how many install occurred via
the Mobile App Install conversion stat. The add in question would have been a
link to the play store via the web -- even if the user is not on a mobile
device.

If I am correct (I can't be sure given the article), the results are not
surprising. A properly run Mobile App Install Campaign can yield sub $2
installs depending on the app being advertised, but that assumes requires some
experience running online ad campaigns.

[1] [https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/ads-
api/mobil...](https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/ads-api/mobile-
app-ads/)

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ig1
This just seems silly. The Facebook ad pointed at the game webpage while the
AdMob ad pointed to the appstore.

Obviously ads that point to the appstore are going to convert at a higher
rate.

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ajross
I think that's uncharitable. What I, as a non-expert take away is that online
ads are complicated and counterintuitive and that even seemingly conservative
strategies ("buy from Facebook") can fail badly. The appropriate tale
treatment for problems like that is blog posts like this one and the
discussion they produce.

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kumarm
Your Best result is from Hacker News for $40 you spent on Facebook Ads and
Admob Ads I Assume?

$20 on each platform is by no means real test.

~~~
lnanek2
Front page of HN is 10k views last time I got it, definitely a big win for
him.

That said, the results are hardly surprising. I showed AdMob ads in a game
once and they paid almost nothing compared to other networks. They have a huge
glut of apps showing ads for almost nothing.

~~~
codeka
So I'm the developer here. I've been posted on HN before and while HN posts
land lots of eyeballs on my website, there's been no noticeable uptick in game
installs at all :)

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curt
From experience spending extremely large amounts of money: If done right
Facebook will win every time. Use targeted mobile app install campaigns,
Facebook's bread-and-butter.

Your main problem is going to be that the game is sci-fi themed. They are very
hard to marketing. If any perspective developers are reading this, don't make
sci-fi themed mobile games.

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mathrawka
Because Facebook doesn't let you get the install referrer, their mobile app
install ads are nearly useless to me.

There is no way to correlate a user who installed via FB with your revenue, if
you have In App Purchases.

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amaks
I'm not surprised that facebook ad is a complete waste of money. First, lots
of people block ads in facebook newsfeed. Second, who would click on ad of a
game when people are busy posting baby's pictures?

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kposehn
I would re-run your test with the following:

1: a better mobile specific Facebook ad 2: the same admob ad 3: a budget of
$350 each to be spent over 7 days

That will provide a much more conclusive test.

~~~
codeka
I wish I had $350 to spend over 7 days :)

But I'm definitely going to try a mobile-specific FB ad, I didn't even know
those were possible!

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gedrap
tl;dr: Comparing conversion rates (a metric which is usually in range of 1-3%)
using a sample size of n = 60 clicks, by just looking at the total number of
registered users.

Even if you had amazingly high conversion rates, with sample of that size, the
total number of conversions could be just about anything. Simple variance.

Well done on releasing the game with good reviews though. That's a great
achievement. Just spend a bit of time just thinking about advertising :)

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bemmu
There was no conversion tracking for the Facebook ads? If I ran this campaign
I would be mainly interested in how much each conversion is worth to me and
what each one cost.

