作者：Gabriel Sturmer

作为一家创造休闲益智游戏（如《Letters of Gold》和《Words of Gold》）的公司，并且主要面对的是35岁以上的女性，像开发博客等常规的游戏开发战术并不适合我们，因为我们的用户通常都不会去浏览博客。同时，像Facebook等用户活跃着的媒体也在通过一些不收费的帖子而削弱我们的接触用户力量，如此我们不得不发挥更大的创造性去接触并留住现有用户，同时也要努力获取新用户。

我们必须找到付费和有机用户获取之间的平衡从而确保在发展的同时也能够赚取利益。

我们决定专注于两大发展渠道，即广告和有机增长（游戏邦注：指公司依托现有资源和业务，通过提高产品质量、销量与服务水平，拓展客户以及扩大市场份额，推进创新与提高生产效率等途径，而获得的销售收入及利润的自然增长）。

广告

关于广告我指的是Facebook广告。在过去6个月我一直致力于为我们的游戏测试并调整Facebook上的广告活动。到目前为止我从广告中所获得的最大收获便是对于你所做的事并不存在任何确定性，为了能够获得最佳ROI，你必须不断地进行测试。

我们已经测试了两种通过广告进行用户获取的方法：

获得最廉价的用户，推动自然发展并能够带来一些付费用户；

获得最昂贵的付费用户，他们曾在游戏中进行消费。

最理想的情况是你能够结合这两种方法。廉价的用户将会转变成付费用户。为了做到这点你需要进行多次测试。

op2-free(from gamasutra)

不要忘记去测试不同用户，国家，兴趣，行为，图像，文本等等。创造相似的用户并通过转换像素去追踪转换率。不要凭空猜测。

我们同样也尝试了AdWords（关键字广告），即付费搜索和Youtube上的视频广告。这两种方法都比Facebook广告昂贵且不那么有效，尽管我们使用了优惠券，但是还是获得了糟糕的ROI。不过也许当我们在下个月在手机上发行《Worlds of Gold》时会再次测试看看。

我们大概有20万用户是来自广告。如今广告价格不断上涨，但我们也会一直想办法从游戏中赚取更多收益以弥补开销。

有机增长

这便是关于许多人所讨厌的Facebook分享与邀请功能，以及我们所刊登的内容和用户互动。我们尝试着将其变成一种积极的体验，从而避免吓跑用户，并且也能够提供给他们如有趣的图像和信息一样的正面体验。这也是我们在了解用户的过程中所学到的内容。

我个人便和我们的许多顶级用户成为了朋友。当他们有疑问时我便会去帮助他们，他们会因此感到满意并邀请其他朋友一起游戏。口口相传是最有效的市场营销方法。所以请好好对待你的用户。

我们同样也完善了游戏的交叉推广，这也帮助我们提升了用户的终身价值。

有机增长是我们大多数用户（大概有30万用户）的来源。并且这些用户通常比广告用户具有更强的用户粘性，但是这一方法需要我们投入与广告不同的努力。当你在执行广告时，你只需要不断花更多钱就可以了。但是有机增长却需要你投入更多创造性，更多努力，同时还要不断调整作品。虽然如此这还是一种非常有价值的方法。

机遇

PR—-与不浏览开发者博客一样，我们的用户也不会阅读任何游戏博客。大多数PR功能能够带给我们认知度，但却不能带给我们用户。我们需要Oprah（美国电视节目主持人），烹饪节目，报纸以及更加传统的媒体的帮助。

Twitter—-我们并未过多地专注于Twitter，但这似乎是获得更多用户的一大机遇，特别是通过与人们进行互动。此外它们也不会像Facebook那样削弱你触及用户的能力。

搜索引擎优化—-我们一直专注于像关键字搜索，填字游戏以及拼字游戏等关键词去创造游戏的登录页面。我同时也致力于创造游戏链接希望能够通过搜索引擎获得一些用户访问。

其它类型广告—-chartboost，谷歌广告，视频广告等等。虽然Facebook很适合我们，但我们并不能只依赖于单一的广告资源。

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转发，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

The Two User Acquisition Tactics That Got Us Half a Million Players

by Gabriel Sturmer

As the person responsible for growth, retention and monetization at Cupcake Sweet Entertainment, I’m quite proud of this achievement, but more still about the ways we’ve found to get there.

Being a company that does casual brain puzzle games (see Letters of Gold and Words of Gold) and works mostly with women over 35 years old, regular game dev distro tactics like dev blog won’t work for us as our audience don’t read blogs. At the same time, media where they are active, such as Facebook, is crippling our reach through unpaid posts and we have to get creative to reach and retain our existing users, as well as get new ones.

We had to found balance between paid and organic user acquisition to get profitable while growing.

We’ve decided to focus on two main growth channels, Ads and Organic Growth.

Advertisement

And by Ads I mean Facebook Ads. I spend most of the last 6 months testing and tweaking Facebook Ads campaigns for our two games. The biggest learning I got so far from advertising is that there isn’t certainty on what you do, it’s a neverending test necessity in order to get the best ROI.

We have tested two different approaches to user acquisition through ads:

Cheapest user you can get, help organical growth plus some paying users;

Most expensive paying users who have a history of spending money in games.

Ideally you’ll get a combination of both. A cheap users that will convert into payers. Tons of tests are necessary in order to get there.

Don’t forget to test different audiences, countries, interests, behaviors, images, text, etc. Create lookalike audiences and track conversion through conversion pixels. Don’t guess it, the image I liked the least was actually the best performer…

We also tried AdWords, both for paid search and Youtube video ads. They were both most expensive and less effective than Facebook ads, bad ROI for us even though we used their coupons (Google it). Might want to test it again when we launch Words of Gold on mobile next month.

About 200K of our users came through advertisement. Prices have grown lately, but we managed to make our games more profitable so that we can cover costs.

Organic Growth

Here comes the Facebook share and invites many people hate, as well as content we post and user interaction. We try to make it as positive experience as possible so that we don’t push users away and still give them something positive like fun images and beautiful messages. By the way, that’s something we learnt by getting to know our users.

I’m personally friends with many of our top users. They reach out when they have questions, I help, they get happy and invite their friends to play. Word of mouth is the best marketing you can get. Be nice to your users.

We also improved cross promotion of our own games, which helped improve user’s LTV.

Organic is where most of our users, about 300K, have come from. They are usually more engaged than ad users, but require a different kind of effort than advertisement. When you are advertising, all you need to do is spend more money. Organic requires more creativity, more effort, as well as tweaking your product, but it’s worth it.

Opportunities

PR – As well as not reading dev blogs, our audience don’t read gaming blogs. Most PR features have given us recognition, but not users. We might need to look into the sorts of Oprah, cooking shows, newspapers and more traditional media.

Twitter – We haven’t focused too much on Twitter yet, but it seems like a nice opportunity to grow and get more users, especially by interacting with people. They also don’t cripple your reach like Facebook is doing on page posts.

SEO – We’ve been investing on creating landing pages for our games with focus on keywords such as word search, crosswords and scrabble. I’m also working on link building hopping to get visita coming from search engines.

Other types of ads – Chartboost, Google ads, video ads, etc. Facebook is working well for us, but relying on a single source of advertisement isn’t ideal.

Conclusion

Let me know what you think about our tactics, I would love to hear your feedback on how we can improve it, as well as if you are planning to use the same tactics yourselves. (source:gamasutra)