Google AdWords Tips | CTR isn’t everything

Never let anyone tell you click-thru rate is the be-all end-all of AdWords analysis. Smile and notify them that they’re not seeing the entire picture.

Clicks are great, but if your traffic doesn’t perform your most wanted response (MWR), then you just lost money. I know of few marketers who want to pay Google to give them traffic that simply pokes around and then wanders off.

WE pay Google to give us traffic so we can provide them information and eventually help them make a purchasing decision.

Take a look at this:

Some people may automatically choose the loosing ad because more people are clicking on it.

Remember, this doesn’t capture the whole picture.

It turns out that the winning ad has a much smaller cost per conversion, a critical piece of info.

To ultimately decide which ad would better suit you, you must include your profit margin and look at what you are able to afford. Here’s what to think about:

1. If your margin is large, sheer masses of sign-ups may benefit you more because this of course leads to more sales.
2. If your margin is small, you want to maximize the efficiency of acquiring customers, which means you might want to focus on conversion rates.

So now if anyone gives you some weakly constructed argument only involving click-thru, you can toss these lemons right back at them.

Disney in digital push

Disney is revamping its digital strategy in Europe with the roll out of a range of virtual worlds, starting with the launch of a 'Pirates of the Caribbean' online game in the UK. A number of other virtual games, based around popular Disney franchises, will follow. These are likely to be linked with Club Penguin, the kid's social network and virtual world that Disney bought in Aug for an initial cash offering of USD350m. The roll out is part of a wider initiative by Disney to enhance its online content. The sites will rely on Disney Xtreme Digital, a widget based platform already available in the US that allows users to log in, personalise Disney content and share it with friends.

More than USD1bn was invested in 35 companies related to virtual worlds over the last year, according to Virtual Worlds Management. However this figure includes the USD700m for Disney's acquisition of Club Penguin, of which half has yet to be paid, dependent on earnings in 2008 and 2009. Intel provided the next most significant individual virtual world investment this year, when it acquired Havok, a tech firm that makes graphics technology for virtual worlds like Second Life for USD110m. In Apr, Gartner predicted that by the end of 2011, 80% of active internet users and Fortune 500 companies would have a presence in a virtual world.

FXLabs Buys Game Portal Knibble.com

FXLabs Studios, developer of video games in India, has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Interactive Media Technology, Inc., a US-based company that owns one of the world's largest online casual games portals, knibble.com.

FXLabs will pay USD 3 million in stock to acquire 100% of IMT.

With over 10,000 online causal games which can be played for free, Knibble has emerged as the best destination for game developers to showcase their talent, wherein registered members can submit new games, add a description, suggest a content rating and add tags.

Sashi Reddi, Founder and Chairman of FXLabs said, "With the acquisition of Knibble we have expanded our capability from being a game developer to a company that will be directly delivering world class game play experience to consumers globally. We are extremely optimistic about emerging markets like India driving worldwide online game revenues and we believe that this is a terrific move for both FXLabs and Knibble."

Knibble games will be available and can be played on the iPhone, Nintendo Wii console and other traditional and non-traditional gaming platforms.

Just my thoughts and some research!

Sart your engines;

1. “Casual gaming” is loosely defined as anything easy to learn that doesn’t require a big time commitment, like Solitaire, Bejeweled or Diner Dash. Games like those have 200 million active players, and pull in $2.25 billion yearly
2. While Microsoft’s famed Solitaire franchise is the most played casual game ever, with more than 400 million people having spent time shuffling their own cards, Microsoft didn’t directly profit — the game is simply a long-running perk for owners of Windows computers. Free play is typically considered a cornerstone of the casual gaming market. Yet there are a handful of gaming portals that do profit, and account for most of those billions of dollars, including AOL Games, Club Penguin, MSN Games, China’s QQ, and Yahoo Games.
3. Although casual game players are evenly distributed through the population, women account for 74% of all paying players, just as young males dominate the hardcore gaming market. Both segments of the gaming industry would like to move into each other’s paying base.
4. Although some money comes in from advertising on gaming sites, there are other revenue models. PopCap, for instance, distributes Bejeweled for free on PCs, but sells the game on mobile phones. Other companies allow free play on the website but charge for downloads, limit the number of levels that can be played without paying, charge for multi-player versions or sell subscriptions.

Facts;

• The casual games industry rakes in $2.25 billion a year, according to the org’s latest research, with growth estimated at a whopping 20 percent.

• over 200 million people play casual games on the Internet each month. And it’s the only sector of gaming that reflects an appropriate gender balance: The ratio of men to women is nearly even, at 48.3 percent to 51.7 percent, respectively, yet 74 percent of people who pay to play casual games are women. In other words, casual gaming is an area of enormous potential for the gaming industry…

• Nine million accounts on World of Warcraft and six million accounts on Xbox Live are, after all, small potatoes compared to the 200 million suggested in sveral reports, but at least Blizzard and Microsoft (MSFT) can count on predictable revenue from every one of their subscribers. And don’t forget, too, that the most popular online hardcore game may still be Counter-Strike, which last year averaged 200,000 simultaneous players at any given moment on Valve’s game delivery service, Steam.

• It’s also good to keep in mind that the money generated from casual gaming doesn’t always go directly to a developer or publisher. Solitaire, which according to the report is the most popular casual game, is a free application that only indirectly profits Microsoft. Casual games are still making baby steps towards acquiring a captive audience and drawing a steady stream of income from it.

Men are just as likely as women to play casual video games...

... but are less likely to admit it, according to an industry report that shatters a widely held industry belief that such games appeal mainly to women.

But women are more likely to buy casual games -- a broad term referring to games that are easy to pick and play -- than men, who are more determined to find a free version or try to thwart anti-piracy protections on games.

Those were some of the findings in the first yearly market report by the Casual Games Association, an industry group aimed at promoting a fast-growing segment that accounts for about 10 percent of the $30 billion global video game market.

"Everyone always thought that casual games were something that only appeal to women," Jessica Tams, managing director of the association, said in an interview. "We have always been obsessed about making games for women."

Surveys of players showed that, while nearly three-fourths of people who bought casual games were women, the players of such games were split 50-50 between the sexes.

The reason men have not been reflected in the data so far is because most males are fans of realistic "hardcore" games and many do not admit they like to play simpler games involving shiny gems or lines of colored balls.

"It was really shocking for everybody. We knew these guys were playing these games," Tams said. "But the hardcore gamer who is playing 'Halo' with his buddies isn't going to brag that he just beat the next level of 'Zuma'."

Such information could be useful to game developers, who are pouring money into the casual games segment amid growing popularity of devices such as mobile telephones with sharp color screens and Nintendo Co Ltd's Wii console.

One emerging trend is the addition of casual games to social networking Web sites such as News Corp's MySpace and Facebook, Tams said.

"You have these two big draws, Facebook and MySpace, but the big problem they've been having is that they haven't been able to monetize their consumers yet and video games are a way for them to monetize their consumers," Tams said.