Why My Ads Suck(ed)
Hi Inventurers!
Nobody likes ads.
In a previous post I talked about how, despite being an important part of community building, they’re a real struggle bus for me.
After reading about good board game Kickstarter FB ad practices, I decided to give it a whirl. This is a little blog post documenting the process of making ads that suck less.
1) Make an ad (that will probably suck)
The first step to learning how to make good ads is to make an ad. If you’re skilled, and studied marketing maybe, that first ad won’t suck. But you just gotta make an ad and see what happens— otherwise, you’ll never learn how people respond to your content, and how to tell your audience the right story.
2) Figuring out that it sucks
You’d think it’s pretty obvious to figure out if your ad worked or not. But the truth is, it’s not!
For this ad, I paid $28 to get 55 people to click a link. That link was to my landing page, where people could sign up for the mailing list. Of those 55 clicks, NONE signed up for the email list 😢.
I wanted to figure out what a successful ad’s conversion rate might look like. So I went back to that blog post I referenced earlier, where the author mentioned a successful ad raised “491 email subscribers for $1.55 per lead average.”
So the metric this professional used wasn’t clicks (as it shouldn’t be). It was successful email addresses gathered. So clearly my ad sucked, if I spent $28 and got NO email addresses…
3) Get feedback to figure out WHY it sucks
I asked for feedback on my favorite game designer community, Board Game Design Lab. Below is the feedback I got:
Cards feel out place and not graphically pleasing.
Box shots aren't hot right now and game play photos are.
Bright backgrounds and videos are also always good.
Keep your text to one sentence.
Cards feel childish in their design and art.
Show more game components.
Convey mechanic of the game.
Art on cards doesn’t match box.
Fix landing page- make it obvious you can scroll down to learn more
Use scene from video for ad
Clarify second ad text
Pay attention to how the ad looks on mobile devices, and pick which apps (instagram, fb, etc.), you’re pushing it to!
So, to put it together: shorter text, replace static image with a components shot from the video (or a gameplay photo or video), fix the landing page!
Also, pay attention to how the ad and landing page looks on mobile vs. desktop.