This Week @Sivart Tech: November 18, 2011

So this week we have been busy working on our December release of Word Crank.  This release will include some exciting new features.

First, we are implementing the Game Feed feature that is new to OpenFeint, which will allow users to find out more about what the other users of the game are doing.  This will include changing their profile pictures to conquering one of the many levels.  We hope that this will be a fun way to become more engaged with our game.

Next, we have several graphics changes that we hope will give the game more appeal and make it more polished.  And with any new build that we work on, performance improvements and bug fixes are the standard.

Also we are excited that our Android downloads are continuing at a steady rate, adding more than 1,000 new downloads over the past week!

October with HOT 99.5: How did we do?

During the month of October we ran a multifaceted campaign with HOT 99.5, a local Washington, DC radio station.  So how did we do?  Here are some of the statistics.

AdMob Revenue

During September we made ~$11 from the AdMob ads that run in the free version of our game.  For the month of October we made about ~$16, so we made about 5 more bucks.  Impressive?  Not really to us...

Word Crank Page Views

Our Word Crank page was another key aspect of our campaign, as it was the URL that we chose for the "Text Back" feature of our campaign.  We went from 28 views in September to 203 views in October.  That was over 7 times the traffic!  For us that was a huge win as it exposed people to our brand and hopefully helped us to get a few downloads and followers of the blog.

Number of People Playing

The October Google Analytics data is shown in the following graphic.  When the numbers were compared against our September data we saw a 25% increase in visits.  We are going to go ahead and give the HOT 99.5 campaign credit for that as well.

Reputation

Our reputation has been the clear winner for us.  Doing this campaign has increased our visibility and really given us tons of credibility with our friends and co-workers. Improved reputation can be a very strategic tool for any small company.  Before doing the campaign our friends and family were our biggest fans, but once they heard the commercials on the radio they began to create more buzz and do even more word-of-mouth marketing for us.  Read my post here about why word-of-mouth marketing is so powerful.

Overall, we are happy with the results.  We would have loved to get a bit more "bang for our buck", but we can always do it again.  Final words of advice to others who may be starting out and considering marketing opportunities, radio is not the best place to start out.  We were able to see comparable gains advertising via AdMob.