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Comment by tikotus | Hacker News Reader

My wife and I have a small life style business, selling a physical product. We make a nice daily profit using Meta ads. X dollars go in, X*A dollars come out, A > 1.0. When not running ads, it's just tumbleweeds.

I also have a digital daily browser puzzle. I've grown the user base quite a bit by running one simple ad on Reddit with amazingly good metrics.

In the past I worked for F2P mobile game companies. Their business is based on running successful internet ad campaigns.

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I would love to hear your process for picking a successful ad campaign. I tried doing meta ads for my mom’s business and it didn’t really go anywhere

The best ad we've had was made by an influencer we hired to do an ad. She knew how to grab the attention of our target audience, and speak to them.

But in general we just slap all kinds of videos there. Some perform 2x better than others, impossible to guess whuch ones, but in the end the range of success isn't massive. I haven't marketed many different kinds of products, but here's my take: If an ad is giving something like 20% return on ad spend, getting to 100% can be tough by just improving the ad. What matters more is that it's a product that is easy to sell. We sell escape game murder mystery magazines. Murder mysteries in any form are simply very easy to sell.

Could you share more about the reddit ad you run? I also have a daily browser puzzle. I haven't done any paid ads but have considered it.

Could you share what you spend vs the players you attract? Any tips or tricks?

EDIT: Oh wow, you make Clues by Sam! It's a great puzzle and one I regularly see people gushing about. Great job!

Thanks!

My ad is just one image and some clickbaity headline. The image is very simple, high contrast, designed to pop out. I'm targeting all kinds of puzzle subreddits. I'm getting just about $0.15 cost per click in US. The budget is quite small, but this helps reaching out to new audiences who spread the game further to their friends. The majority of the growth is still organic, but ads do help. I'm still not sure if it's a net positive though, since I don't have strong monetization in the game, and don't do any fingerprinting of users, or much analytics at all.

Thanks! That’s great info.

If you’re up for it I’d be interested to chat and learn more about Clues By Sam and how you monetize it.

I make my own daily game and would be happy to share what has and hasn’t worked for me: https://tiledwords.com

If you feel like chatting send me an email at paul@paulmakeswebsites.com

No worries either way. Cheers!

Ah, Tiled Words is great! Well done. Did you know Netflix launched a daily puzzle platform, Puzzled, around the time your game came out, and they have a similar game called Bonza (which they acquired, the game exsited as an app before that)? I found it an interesting coincidence.

Thanks!

Yeah I learned about Bonza (and Puzzled) after launching Tiled Words from someone on Reddit.

Definitely some interesting gameplay overlaps!

Nice to see this being top comments. For a long time Ads were nearly universally seen as evil on HN ( and wider Silicon Valley ) and the topic discussions will always be downvoted, flag or becomes a moral compass argument.

I guess HN is healing.

I still find ads questionable, even if I rely on them. If I spend, say, $100 on ads, after printing and shipping, I make, say, $10 dollars in profit. Meta just made $100 dollars in profit, thanks to my hard work that earned me a fraction of that. It's hard to swallow and fathom what an amazing business they're running.

Same goes for F2P games. They pour millions (billions) into marketing games, with crazy small profit margins. When a mobile game company earns a million, Meta earns 10 millions (or more). Apple opens up the platform for 3rd party appstores with only 15% cut instead of 30%. Where does this new profit margin go? Into ads. Now companies can afford putting more money into ads, to outcompete others. Others follow suit. Instead of a million, the company now earns 1.01 millon in profit. Meta earns 11 million.

This isn't the ad platforms' fault, but I still find it somehow wrong.

Edit: typos

I understand your argument, but part of this comparison is between Net profits and Revenue. While it cost Meta close to zero to have that ad space, it does cost meta money to run their platform. It is the same with any good old classified ads, or even free newspaper.

Meta dont actually dictate the value of ad space, they are largely market driven. Even though Meta may try to manipulate it to their advantage. Had they not been able to provide positive returns for those ads, they would not been able to continue and charge those price.

Also I think this is somewhat US specific. I dont know if that is still the case but US digital ads works really well. And they cost far higher than European or other part of the world.

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