What is the difference between advertising PC games on Reddit and Facebook: the experience of the Hooded Horse publisher
Facebook is often used to advertise mobile games. However, this social network has its own peculiarities when it comes to promoting PC titles. The publisher of Hooded Horse shared his experience, also talking about the difficulties and advantages of Reddit as an advertising platform for hardcore genre games.Terra Invicta
Gaming expert Simon Carless (Simon Carless) talked about this topic with Tim Bender (Tim Bender).
He heads the publisher Hooded Horse, which specializes in publishing strategies, RPGs and simulators from small indie developers.
According to Bender, targeting on Reddit is pretty accurate. Ads will only be shown to people who have recently visited your selected subreddits. At the same time, the right users will see ads, even if they are in other sections of the forum at that moment.
Thus, by choosing the right subreddit, you can almost guarantee access to the target audience. If a developer needs access to specific groups of people, Reddit can become a very effective, transparent and easy-to-learn platform.Targeting on Facebook is much less accurate. On the one hand, you can choose people who liked a certain game. On the other hand, the sample may include a person who liked a random post with this game a few years ago.
The problem with advertising on Facebook is that the social network is primarily focused on mobile projects. That is why strategies and urban planning simulators are understood to be completely different games. Since such titles are not similar to projects like Civilization or Anno, there may be difficulties when advertising games of this genre.
At the same time, Facebook allows you to place ads that are not possible on other sites. For example, you can select all users who like a certain theme or a list of games. It also allows you to automatically find the right audience based on a wider sample.
Based on the experience of Hooded Horse, there are several main ways to launch targeted advertising on Facebook:
- choose one topic and sections intersecting with it to get a high-quality and narrow group of people as a result;on the contrary, choose the widest possible group of people who like a certain topic or list of games.
- After that, Facebook itself will determine the necessary audience within a large sample;configure the audience yourself — for example, based on a list of email addresses.
- After that, Facebook will be able to pick up people who are similar to the selected group.According to Bender, first you need to decide on a daily budget and spend only 20% of it.
If the advertising campaign shows effectiveness, it is worth increasing spending up to 25% of the initially selected amount. And then gradually increase the budget.
Thus, it is always necessary to find a compromise between the size of the audience and the budget. If you define a narrow enough audience, you can spend less money, but also get fewer installations. If you define too wide an audience, then there is a risk of wasting the budget.
You need to act slowly and give the Facebook system time to adapt to the parameters you set. This will allow you to find the most suitable audience, which is likely to like the advertised product. At the same time, it is worth checking the data on Steam daily to find out if the ads are converted to new players.
