I did some research on the Google PPC, Adworks. Here is what I found out and did. There are certain keywords that a mass market for Muds don't use. I think it has more to do with folks not wanting to spend the money on it than anything else. Certain words don't have a lot of ads attached to them. So, I put an ad out there for us on google using these keywords.

mud
muds
carrionfields
carrion
fields
rpg
multi user dungeon

I set the buget really low, just to see how many times it pops up when I use these target words. I think that we can get a lot of use out of this. First thing, don't click on the ad when you see it. The budget is low for a reason. Google doesn't have a lot of advertisers using these specific key words, so the price per click will be low. Now, they want to show potential clients that they have a lot of ads to generate more funds. This will give us a lot of visibility for a very low cost.

Go ahead and use your google search for these keywords separately. See how many times the Carrionfields pops up. Do it repeatedly. But, don't click on the ad! I want to see how many days we get for the amount I set.

Just saw this forum/post so thought I'd throw my $0.02 in.

I work in online advertising strategy.. you can use Google Adlytics - built into AdWords, to project monthly impressions, clicks, CTRs and budgets.

For the words you listed, you need to use a lot more than just those you selected and cast a wider net. As you track conversions, you can become more efficient and narrow down the keywords you use. Most of your traffic will come from branded search terms like 'carrion fields' but I don't expect you to get any mileage out of 'carrion' or 'fields' by themselves.. from a user perspective, it is not logical to correlate the game to either of these words.

I'm sure you have something on the site like Hitwise to track site stats, but toss in pixels from Google Analytics to a bunch of different entry points (like Homepage, New Player Forum, Registration Completion) so Google can optimize there. For one of you coder junkies, there's a way to turn the Google tracking pixel to fire off a click so you can track people that hit 'play now' though they'll probably be low. I imagine you guys have some way to tie IPs of website visits to telnet login.

If you're looking to save money, pay for direct match and avoid paying for misspellings like 'carroin fields' or 'musd.' People that search for CF will find it if they want to in the organic listings (non paid).

Make sure to have multiple creatives in market and see which convert better - then optimize as necessary. Words like 'free' get lost in a text ad so I'd recommend focusing more on the immediate user benefit (immerse yourself, etc..) than the game mechanics (free).

Spend an hour in Photoshop putting together a banner ad to run in Google's content network (these are the ads that show up on Dioxide's). It's more expensive for a reason - users have learned to ignore text in content areas. If you go down this road, you can probably exclude www.qhcf.net from the reach your banners will receive :-).

One final note is that online advertising is very math based, because everything is trackable and is a data point. Your online strategy is supposed to learn from itself month over month as you study numbers and trends.. so, you can feel comfortable investing more in the beginning knowing that it will inform greater efficiencies and less spend month after month. From an effectiveness perspective online:

word of mouth > search > affiliate > banner

.. so if you're trying to figure out how to spend your marketing budget, the above tenets generally hold true. WOM you can't control, so really you're focusing on search, affiliate, and banner. Last point on this is that all 3 feed each other to create a halo effect - and this is something you need to determine through your analysis as to what the best marketing mix is.

Cheers,

-G.

This is just a test run. We won't be doing any full blown advertising until there is eye candy on the site and until we build up PBFs for an advertising budget so we can do the things such as banners, etc. Random words that we know but nobody else knows acts as a placebo for the test.

Do you think it's a good idea to wait until there is 'eye candy' on this site? This site has been exactly the same for what, the last 5 years? It doesn't seem like it's going to change anytime soon.

Maybe you can start some sort of PBF counter or something. I know eventually PBFs get published and you can count there, but it doesn't happen in real time. Maybe every time someone donates and gets Zulg's automated PayPal response, there can be a ticker on this site that reflects it. It might be easier to have some sort of visual count-down in order to get some action from the playerbase.

A monthly goal that was visible in a ticker form is highly motivating for those of us who might want to throw 5 bucks in to make sure our "advertising budget" stays in the black.

5,886 views. Half from affiliate sites. There is no doubt we can get some views. And we are definitely seeing an influx of new blood. I am changing some words to the ad to see if we get more clicks now. Adding the word Free to the ad.

3360 views. Half from affiliate gaming sites with one new player who hit the ad and started playing. rpgs and muds are the highest number of searched single words and account for nearly 1400 of the solo views. 9 clicks on the ads bringing them to our site.

sadf

Carrionfields MUD RPG
Custom Multi User Dungeon Game
14+ years No Money Needed Ever
www.carrionfields.com

The only search term I used consistently looking for MUDs before I found CF.

Wow, the ads really hit hard on Saturday and we had some more new players hit ads itself. I added the word rpgs and that got 567 viewings yesterday. In the partnet sites, we are up to 627. We now have 6 clicks on the ads from new players. I may need some of you to click on this ad in the coming days. I don't want Google to see us as not using our budget. Our total viewings since I put this ad up are now 1,378. Rpg and muds are second and third in viewings.

Any way to test who actually log on or press the play now link?

New players are easily found after they log in by their command structure and questions on the newbie channel. Over the weekend, we have seen some newer players and a few of them have made it to level 10 or above.

There is probably a chart on the website to see what that is, but, it has only been three days that this has been underway. I would give it at least a week to a month to see if those numbers are changing drastically in any way.

Well, if go really seriously, it is possible to see the exact behaviour of user #4324 who came from site #43 two days ago by the ad #2, which costs 12cents,*, he started to play and he made a ranger and raise him for 6 rank already

*after that it will require some coding

I use a TON of PPC.

I'm assuming right now you're just testing and not really trying to direct traffic?

From my experience the BEST way to do PPC is with Reach Local. (www.reachlocal.com) I've tried several similar services for both my consulting stuff and my school. Reach local is by far the best. You pay a slight higher price per click for their management, but they custom design your search words based on results. They have a program that manages all that, so it is infinitely better than trying to do it yourself. They also put you EVERYWHERE there is PPC (as long as it is generating you clicks) and do all your search engine entry.

I think we're really getting the cart before the horse, because we haven't established a budget or what those ads should say. I'm going to get off the horse about that, actually, and let the frenzy of the new page die down a little. I think right now everyone is excited and going off like loose cannons. I did want to mention this though, before you went and did a ton of work that you might not need to do.

The budget I have set for this test is very low. What I am working on is not so much directing the traffic, but how many times our ads will appear over a certain period of time. As it stands right now with just over 12 hours, the ads have shown up 108 times. This 108 times has only cost 30 cents. I am also watching hour by hour when the ads are showing as well. This will give us a better idea if we want to add more money to a single ad, or, if we want to ad more ads and break up the money as well.

Yea, with Reach Local you just give them a budget, and they divide it up over adwords, overture (or whatever they call it now) and all the others, also determining what keywords are working best for you. It takes all the guess work out of PPC management.

The cost is a little higher, but if your spending .30, it ain't going to be that much higher. As an example I spend about $250/mo and I completely dominate the internet in my local area. I'm pulling in anywhere from 5-50x the traffic of my competitors from all the internet based stuff I do, but reach local can take a lot of credit for that.

I think it's worth a phone conversation with them. I can talk to my rep when we have an idea of what our budget and target market will be.

Yeah, it's only costing us 10 cents a click right now. I think with a third of that 250 a month we would be covered really well based upon how much actually comes up with those keywords. The problem with adding too many keywords is that your cost goes up. For instance, if I add game or games, our actual air time could go down to nil because we would be buried 4 pages back. So, I am trying to get the most bang for the buck on being a little more centralized on what it actually is.

I'm not trying to be an a$$, I think I must not be articulating myself well - but this is exactly what Reach Local does... they figure out exactly where your bang for buck is because they try everywhere with a multitude of keywords and over time figure out where you're getting the most click thru. (Over time being good after one month, perfect after four.)

Oh, I wasn't saying that at all. Right now, we are getting a lot more air time with the words we have right now within their partner content. They are the sites that are associated with the keywords that we have than in the Google Search. Out of 345 hits we have had, 222 have come from the partner sites. This is good because the partner sites we are hitting have been 90% gaming communities that have our keywords in it. 345 hits in 2 days for a $5 budget is awesome no matter how we look at it. There has been a little bit of an influx the past two days with new players as well. If we can multiply this effort by 10-15 times without it actually costing us more for the hits, that would be sweet.

Kinda leads me back to what I was saying with figuring out how many new players we can really take at a time. I mean, say we multiplied this 10 or 15 times and we had all the players we could responsibly handle, we wouldn't NEED or want to do anything else.

I was also kind of trying to get a feel for how big we want to be in our wildest dreams. Do we want to stay small where we know everyone, or do we like the idea of 50 imms and 1000 players online at a time?

I really feel like the sky is the limit, because there is like, 0 barrier to entry on this thing. It's ####ing free, and it's ####ing awesome. It doesn't take Donald Trump to make this thing work.

I'm not sure if it costs more to have more words, but you might want to consider removing:

carrionfields
carrion
fields

If they already know the name Carrion Fields, they're gonna find the website. If you search for "carrion fields" or "carrionfields" this website is the first result. Even if they just search for "carrion," this site still shows up at the bottom of the first page of results.

That way you won't have people clicking on something that would cost money when they already have found it.

So far, none of those have gotten any real hits. As it looks right now, rpg, rpgs and muds are the words being hit the most.

Between 12:00 AM and 9:00 AM our ad was triggered 24 times with one click on the ad. The ad is only showing up in the United States. I still haven't determined if the ad is triggered more by time or more by hits or a combination of both.

Okay, now I am going to ask you to not use the following words in your searches on google.

mud
muds
carrionfields
carrion
fields
rpg
multi user dungeon

This may give us an idea on how many people who aren't playing CF and reading these posts actually use their keywords for a search.

Thanks for the help.

The ad started running again. This 54 a day may be 54 an hour. We are now up to 83 and 2 have clicked on the ad itself. Each click is costing us 10 cents. If you are already playing, please don't click on the ad. Let's keep that for the new blood. Of course, we did just have 2 newbies start playing who haven't played before, so, maybe that was them.

The ads hit 54 times in the first 15 minutes before it stopped showing. I accounted for nearly 10 and another imm accounted for nearly 5. Did any of you see the ad hit under any of those search words?

Edit: probably it was a more toward 7:50-755. My laptop clock's off apparently.

We're talking about the "sponsored links" on the right? I'm a bit ignorant as to how PPC works...

Is the ad price accrued per hit via search or per click?

(I'd think price per click means click)

How much it cost?

Yes, it is the sponsored links. I set the budget very low ($5) to see how many visuals of the ad I would get before it stopped showing. We got 54 visuals before it stopped showing. I have the stats. None of them were clicked on, but, that's because the staff and a few players accounted for most, if not all of them. I am going to see when they start showing again. Now, based upon the help files, I may have used my daily limit when we reached that 54. But, our budget has not been used at all. The budget is only used if the ad is actually clicked. I would prefer if new blood sees that. If their help file is correct and we are going to get 50 visuals a day for 30 days for $5 a month, that's 1500 visuals a month. Mind you, we and the player base are not going to be spamming the key words.