How we did our unity ads advertisement and what we learned from it

The advertisement/commercial was for our first game Tick Tock Toad. We produced the advertisment on minimal budget. The few scenes we shot was recorded with our mobile phones, a Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge, an iPhone 4 and an iPhone 6.

The editing tool we used was Adobe After Effects CC 2017. All of the graphics and music  we used was material that we had already produced for the game so we just had to put it in After Effects and do some animation. It took about 8-16 hours in total.

The result turned out pretty great we thought:

What was the idea behind the video’s content?

The content of the advertisement is a few clips of people playing the game and you barely get to see the game itself. We did that for two reasons: the first being that we wanted to create excitement to want to see the game and therefore to want to download it. Secondly it was faster than recording good gameplay. We could do it on our free time; being on the way to work or being home with our families.

What was good about the way we made the advertisement?

The advertisement worked well – it worked really well. Too well actually, at least in the sense that it used up our budget on unity ads in something like two days or so.

What was really bad about the way we presented the game in the ad?

It attracted all kinds of users. The people who saw the advertisement didn’t know what the game was about yet they were intrigued and wanted to download and try the game. That’s great if you have an infinite advertisement budget. Ours ran out and we had attracted very few users that would actually want to play the game.

Lesson learned

We spent about $2000 to air the advertisement on Unity Ads and the result was that we got about 900 players worldwide. From that we made about $3 in ad earnings an none of those users bought any of the in app purchase items.

What we learned is that when you air an advertisement of a game it probably doesn’t have to do a good job in attracting players if it’s on Unity Ads. Since we paid for each install and not each view we should have made a video showing what the game was about. If we had done that, the players actually installing the app would both have already gotten some tutorial type info from the video and they would have known that they probably would like the game we made.