Some Thoughts on Paid Advertising
There are a few types of paid advertising. Most common in the board game marketing space are:
Paid ad campaigns (usually Meta over Google, i.e. Facebook, Instagram, etc.)
Sponsored content (paid previews & reviews)
Display advertising (banners on Facebook groups, BGG, etc.)
For Sigil, we are running a modest paid advertising campaign as well as a full preview/review campaign (both sponsored and unpaid). Today, I want to talk a bit about the ecosystem of paid advertising.
Some of the creative for our Sigil campaign.
For context, I don’t consider myself a marketing expert, so take my points for what they’re worth. I go into detail on our paid ad campaign for Nut Hunt (which was disappointing) in this article, and cover our more successful organic and sponsored content campaigns here.
Jellop & Kickstarter
Earlier this week Kickstarter announced a partnership with Jellop as their recommended advertising agency.
As an indie board game publisher, I would avoid using Jellop, and if I were in the market for an agency would prefer a more specialized partner:
Backerkit & Gamefound have a pretty material advantage over most ad agencies due to the amount of data they have from their pledge managers.
One of the challenges of running a successful advertising campaign is not just in the copy and creative, but in the ad targeting. Backerkit & Gamefound have massive databases of past backers and the ability to construct accurate lookalike audiences.
Crowdfunding Nerds doesn’t have the same benefit, but has seen success on past campaigns, and I hold the team over there in high regard.
Update (a note from Sean Bradford at Crowdfunding Nerds):
I would add that we might not have the same data points as Backerkit or Gamefound, however we do retain the pixel control of all our client accounts. This is for many reasons. A big one being as a backup should an account be closed, and thus all the data from the pixel be inaccessible.
That being said we too are able to leverage data points between clients, I would argue in an even more precise way because it can be dispensed in such a way that is game/theme specific.
Jellop likely has a dataset on par with Backerkit & Gamefound, and depending on the terms of their Kickstarter partnership might get more specialized board game data. My hesitancy with recommending them is due to mixed (and bad reviews) I’ve heard from other indie publishers.
Creative Inspiration
Facebook Ad Library is an excellent place to go for ad inspiration. You can search either for a specific campaign, or by company, and peruse thousands of ads.
You can use them as inspiration for your campaign, especially if you have a game in a specific genre. Unfortunately, while you can search for ads from campaigns you know were successful, there isn’t a way to see the ad spend or details of ad performance.
Targeting
If you are running your own advertising campaign one of the most important lessons is around targeting.
This is the demographic skew of our current Facebook ads campaign. What’s interesting is that we didn’t target based on gender or age, just based on interests (like Chess or Go).
When you create an ad campaign you need to choose your audience intelligently. Facebooks algorithm is structured to optimize for whatever metric you are tracking. But, giving it a more focused audience can both help that process as well as maximize ultimate conversions.
This Backerkit article goes into detail on how to set up a campaign and audience.
Our Sigil targeting.
For Sigil we’re targeting people in the US with an interest in both board games, crowdfunding, and at least one popular abstract strategy game.
Lookalike Audiences
The best performing Facebook ad campaigns use lookalike audiences. That is, rather than input demographic targets and interests, Meta AI can extrapolate an audience from a pre-existing list.
This list can be scraped with a Pixel plugin on your website, or based on past audiences, or customers.
I have spoken with publishers who report lead costs of close to $1 per e-mail lead when using a lookalike audience based on actual customers who have bought their games. This is especially powerful when marketing similar genre games.
This is an inherent advantage for incumbent publishers, and for services like Backerkit & Gamefound marketing which have extensive data on consumer purchasing history.
For further reading, check out:
Backerkit (search by topic)
What is a game that you discovered through an ad campaign?
