Why are those long in-app game ads always misleading/showing a completely different game than what it actually is. Why would a company choose, marketing-wise, to put money and effort into an add that doesn’t represent its product at all?
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Many of them are implicitly aimed at children who find the flashy graphics and obvious “puzzles” in the ads appealing. I’m meaning kids aged say 5-12 years old who can pester their parents for in-game currencies or use a bank card without permission.
The mismatch in ad vs gameplay doesn’t really matter once you’ve already got the install. Then they can just use different psychological hooks. It’s really more like a casino than a game.
They can make one cheaply made game, and several different ads. Ads are cheaper to make and can show off different style games to convince different people to download.
It’s easier and cheaper to make a cool ad than a cool game.
Misleading ads = a lot of downloads
A lot of downloads = high rank on the stores
High rank on stores = even more downloads
Even more downloads = a lot of in app ads views
A lot of in app ads views = money
Another aspect that some have missed is that the Ad space is very crowded and there are dynamic prices at play.
For example, you may have seen ads for a certain game that needs you to save a king from dying. This game is a match-3 game which is a very popular genre.
Now think that you want to advertise your own match-3 game. You will need to spend millions of dollars to dispute ad space with the Royal Match (the king game). Everytime an ad is going to be shown to someone, Royal Match bids X dollars to show an ad of its own, thus you need to bid X+Y to win
You may think you are doomed as a company right? Becaus the prices are already too high and you will need to pay even higher. What do you do? You show an ad of some rings in a hoop carnival game because you know will reach a similar public but that wont compete with Royal Match!
The person will download the game thinking they will throw some rings in a hoop, but it is only the first 5 stages like that. The next stages are a match-3 game. Surprise!! Many will stay regardless because they also like match-3
Many people here claim the reason is not wanting to spend money, which is entirely false. The games shown in ads are actually not that hard or expensive to develop, especially for a big company. The reason they don’t is that those games on the ad look interesting, but actually quite boring when played more then 10 minutes. But they bring more clicks than the original game footage. So they advertise the fake game to get people in, and serve the actual decent game to keep them. If they served the fake game for real, they would make much less money.
I would genuinely like to play a simple, clean, non-laggy colour sorting or block matching game, like I used to spend all my time doing on Neopets 20 years ago. I see mobile ads for them all the time, but I’ve never downloaded an actual game because I’m sure it’ll also be an ad-ridden, slow, unpleasant mess.
Any recommendations for actually decent versions of those games are very welcome 🙂 I currently spend most of my time on Slitherlink, I Love Hue and Atomas.
If mobile games are disposable, it’s easy to make one good ad and shove it in front of 100 different shovelware games you’re making than trying to make 100 different ads.
They also found that gamers don’t always care about specifically what game they’re playing. As long as the genre is close enough by the time the boot it up, they might try it anyway. Like, you might think “oh maybe the part in the ad shows up later” and they sometimes end up liking the game they’re playing and end up playing more. Even if they don’t like the game as much as they might have liked the game that they got advertised, they might like it a little bit. And if they like it even a little bit the advertisement has succeeded.
It turns out that people who try and play free mobile games based are not that discerning. You’re already playing a kinda shit mobile game if see the ads in the first place.
A lot of those apps will purely exist to sell your info and they will normally ask for a ton of unnecessary permissions.
Because the company aren’t creating the ads themselves in those cases. Affiliate/performance marketers are. In this case, the company will have no idea or control of what advertising is actually bringing in the new users. This is called Cost Per Action marketing.
What’s the appeal in choosing to go to a CPA marketing network to get new users rather than doing your own marketing in-house?
When you go to a CPA network, the only thing you are paying for is new users. It’s the affiliates that are taking on all the expenses of creating and testing all the advertising.
So the appeal is, “we could spend a ton of money on a marketing campaign in-house that could bomb and we can keep sinking money into testing different campaigns without ever recouping any of the cost. Or we could go to a CPA network, let their affiliates pay for the ad campaigns and traffic, and we only pay for new users.”
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