Almost the entirety of Stonemaier Games’ marketing strategy is based on a few key elements: Contributing to the gaming/creative community (e.g., blog posts like this), opt-in subscribers (e.g., our enewsletter), other content creators (e.g., reviewers), and play-and-win sections at conventions. Every now and then we pay for a banner ad on BoardGameGeek or a Google ad, but that’s really the extent of our traditional advertising methods.
A few months ago, I received an intriguing email from Merritt Trigg that said (among other things): “My company, Hackstone, is a video agency that has produced content for board games, digital games and fringe CPG brands that have averaged nearly a 7:1 return on ad spend while increasing AOV and LTV without breaking the bank for production.”
Much of the industry jargon in that sentence was well over my head, and it was something else in his email that really piqued my interest. Merritt shared a link to a video Hackstone had produced and advertised for a game called Hunt a Killer…and it had over 10 million views.
I haven’t played Hunt a Killer, but I’ve heard from one of our distributors that it has sold incredibly well. The Hunt a Killer YouTube channel had only around 7,000 subscribers, so clearly Hackstone had done something special to get that many eyeballs on the video.
So after some internal discussion, we decided to give Hackstone a budget to create a campaign for Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest. This was partially to support the game and partially to see if this type of advertising is something we should be more open to. I told Merritt up front that I would eventually write about the process and the results, and he was amenable to that (and he knew that a great performance from Hackstone could result in more business from us and other creators).
The Plan
We committed to a 2-month Hackstone advertising campaign. They would create the campaign, manage it, track the results, and adjust as needed to optimize the ad spend.
We already had a teaser trailer for Libertalia, so instead of starting over from scratch, Hackstone used that footage plus some of their own to create 15-second, 30-second, and 60-second videos to use in various places.
Creating and managing the campaign involved the following for Hackstone:
- Set up initial targeting parameters and demographic data.
- Perform A/B testing to ensure validity of campaign and make adjustments as needed.
- Monitoring of ad engagement and optimization through (re)targeting and editing of assets
as needed. - Monitoring the budget and optimizing as needed to prevent quick spend or
unwanted spend. - Ensuring tracking is working properly across all fronts for accurate attribution
- Providing updates and analysis – typically on a bi-weekly basis, though we can provide
more frequent updates as desired
Throughout the 2-month experiment, Hackstone would monitor the data to see which audiences were responding to the ads and which weren’t so they could continually refine who they were targeting and how much we were spending per click.
For all of this, we budgeted the following:
- $2,000 setup fee
- $2,500/mo management fee ($5,000 total over 2 months)
- $4,000 for video creation
- $10,000/mo ad spend limit ($19,791 was actually spent in total ad spend)
- TOTAL: $30,791
The Results
I’ll get to the data in a second, but the first category of results is logistics. Hackstone ran into an early glitch when our account was suspended due to an erroneous flag, but it was resolved after a few weeks. There were also some SEO (search engine optimization) issues with our webstore, and for a while it felt like there were daily requests from Hackstone for us to do or change something about our webstore, website, YouTube channel, etc. Even though I know Hackstone was doing a lot of work, it also seemed like they were creating a lot of work for us in the meantime, which isn’t what I’d signed up for. I communicated this to Merritt, and the requests stopped.
The second category is views. To date, the three videos that Hackstone created and used for the campaign have a total of 70,423 views. It’s a fine number, though nothing close to Hunt a Killer’s 10 million views. I didn’t notice any difference in YouTube subscribers, but given that it’s a game-design focused channel, I wasn’t expecting any casual ad-viewers to become permanent subscribers.
The third category–the point of the entire campaign–is sales. Hackstone linked to our US webstore and had access to Shopify data, allowing them to pair every click through to the resulting sales. They didn’t provide data for May in their final report, but their June results were $11,726 in revenue.
Another way to look at sales is on Libertalia specifically, as that was the focus of the campaign. Our Libertalia sales total in June was $2,537 and our metal doubloon sales were $1,681 for a grand total of $4,218 I don’t know how much of that is a direct result of Hackstone’s campaign, but we can credit them for the full amount for the sake of this discussion. In comparison, in April on the US store before the ad campaign, our Libertalia sales were $4,328 and our doubloon sales were $1,484 for a total of $5,812.
The other side of sales that we can’t compute is if the awareness and intrigue caused by the campaign resulted in retail sales. Libertalia’s retail release date was April 29, right before the campaign began. While I certainly hope that this campaign helped retailers, I have no way of measuring it.
So overall, in terms of what Hackstone measured, we spent $30,791 and earned $11,726 ($4,218 of which was for the target product) for a total net loss of $19,065.
Final Thoughts
Positive: I think Hackstone is really good at creating evocative mixed-media videos. I also think Merritt did a great job of communicating throughout the project, especially once we got past the jargon.
Mixed: I’m certainly grateful for the boost in sales, and I understand that advertising is only as good as the product you’re selling. But given Hackstone’s track record of a 7:1 return on ad spend, I was hoping to break even on the campaign at the very least. Instead, we lost $19,065.
Would I Do It Again: I’m glad for the experiment, and perhaps we cut it off prematurely (Merritt believes we would see a 2:1 return on ad spend if we added another month). However, based on the data collected to date, I don’t plan to pursue this type of ad campaign again.
What do you think about this type of campaign? Does it work better for certain products and not others? What type of advertising do you pay attention to (or have had success with as a creator)?
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68 Comments on “10 Million Views: The Results of an Advertising Experiment”
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[…] Hackstone Experiment: We don’t typically use traditional advertising methods, but we like to experiment to see if we’re missing a way to reach customers. A marketing company called Hackstone ran a video-based ad campaign for 2 months…and the final results yielded a net loss of of $19,065. […]
I’ll speak from our experience.
We are first-timers on Kickstarter just now doing a project for Silver Coin: Age of Monster Hunters.
We had add-experts helping us in the past, but we decided to end the cooperation with them before the campaign started because we could not measure properly the KPIs and had a feeling that financially it is not worth it.
We are also in partnership with Backerkit and that one was/is helping us during the campaign.
As for the video, we checked our options and were offered:
– 4000$ animation video (basic)
– 6000-7000$ animation video (advanced)
– 10000$ animation video (total package)
For us, it was simply too big of a budget and we basically in the end decided to do it on our own and worked on it for about 5 months.
So my final point. Apart from Backerkit’s help -> Boost we have done things on our own from a marketing point of view.
We gathered about 4700 Followers for the KS prelaunch page before the campaign went live and used organic reach. Results of course cannot be compared to big companies as we simply do not have big budgets for Marketing activities.
However, my current feeling is, that you need to be careful with your investments in this area as it is one of the most important and at the same time probably most expensive part of the project.
For established companies, this is not as a delicate thing as for First-time creators. For them it may be a matter of is your project is financially viable and successful or not.
So be careful especially about marketing agencies approaching you and presenting to you their best versions and stats. We as well were approached by many and still are in the middle of the campaign. Think about what really works for you and your audience and how much of it, you can do yourself and how will experts help you.
Set a ROAS in advance goal together with the marketing agency if you are doing this (Backerkit for example does this).
Thus limiting the hard fall and financial losses in case things do not go as planned.
Also, know upfront that returns will be best at the beginning of your marketing campaign and will start to dwindle the more $ you throw at the marketing.
Example = 40$/day may bring you great returns at the beginning and increasing this to 400$/day will decrease the ROAS significantly.
Know it in advance and prepare for it also I would advise, learning about marketing and things like FB ads as it will aid you in assessments and will save you important funds when creating projects.
There is one thing giving marketing to companies like Backerkit, Jello, and so on with their enormous and targeted base of clients and completely another giving it to some random Marketing agency who is just good with videos or FB ads in general.
If anyone needs help with this we are always reachable and willing to help.
Thank you Jamey for sharing the info. As always you learn a lot by reading these things.
Wish everyone a great weekend!
Best
Lan
Thanks so much for sharing your experiences, Lan!
Here is hoping the assets made for you can be used elsewhere! Just saw another fan of the game dislike the artwork – I think the storytime Libertalia will change all of that and open up the game to more audiences. I can say with certainty that 100% of the people who have played SM games at my shop have later purchased the game and extra game related bling after playing it. We dont currently do affiliated marketing, but perhaps it would help in maintaining the library.
I look at Values and Word of mouth for other business advertising. Who is the business I am supporting, and what do they do that is remarkable. For boardgames, games that are intentional about making the game easy to teach and get to the table are games Im looking to invest in.
100% is an amazing conversion rate–thank you so much for sharing our games at Gopo!
Scythe is 200% but notice the numbers arent posted 😂. We are going through Fenris and Im eyeing The airship and board extension for the shop now… The peeps are really excited to play other SM games, but someone from SM is going to Jeff City next week, we are hoping to meet and talk. Pumped to have SM in my shop after 9 years on the fence, so worth the donation 🤘
This is a fascinating post; thank you for posting it and being so open about it.
I also didn’t mean this to be a point-by-point breakdown of your post. I love context, and digital marketing is tough to explain, so this ballooned into something more significant.
I also don’t know the whole story, so I am trying to stay away from speculation, as Board Game/Game marketing is not my bailiwick.
1. To directly answer your question at the end, I like this kind of campaign; it works better for certain products/industries. I did get this Libertalia ad a few months ago, which made me interested in SM, which in turn made me purchase Wingspan (in person & on sale). But, creative & targeting play such a massive part in successfully launching a YouTube campaign that it’s hard to say if I would recommend doing this particular campaign again. I would try and switch up messaging between ad lengths or produce three :30sec ads with different messages for different purposes.
— I don’t know that I would expand your marketing efforts elsewhere, IE Facebook ads or Display ads, *unless* they were purely Remarketing (reaching people who have purchased other games or have visited Libertalia web pages).
2. A 7:1 ROAS (return on ad spend) sounds good but is incredibly hard to achieve with just two months of spending, doubly so if you have never worked with that brand before. You might have gotten a 2:1 ROAS in the third month of advertising. Still, you probably would not have recovered the $19,065 you already sank into the campaign. Also, if your campaign is not working in the first 500,000 impressions, there is no shame in pausing and completely switching up targeting, etc.
3. For those who are reading and don’t know, AOV is “Average Order Value,” and LTV is “Lifetime Value of a Customer”. AOV is a fancy way of saying can we get people to buy a second product in the same purchase. LTV is increasing the total sales from one person over time; for example, I purchased Wingspan, try Libertalia. It’s also a huge pet peeve of mine to have people use industry jargon during pitches.
4. Your plan with Hackstone seems most reasonable and standard for a YouTube campaign. Ideally, you would come up with a list of targeting options that makes sense for you. For example, board game review YT channels, or let’s play channels on YT, possibly some ads on The Pirate History Podcast, or influencer marketing to a broader audience.
— I am very surprised none of the advertising videos mention you are the creators/makers of Viticulture, Tapestry, Wingspan, etc. There is a reason every action movie trailer likes to let people know, “We worked on John Wick”.
— I would recommend that if you keep an ad video up, you may want to rename them. For example, Libertaila 60 to “Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest, a Pirate game”. This will help you, in the long run, get better organic results (I would hide the 15 & 30). I would also suggest adding a Category (Gaming is for apps & video games) and links to your other games in the descriptions (or as a comment).
5. Typically digital advertising charges between 15-30% based on ad spend and can also ask for a retainer to cover other costs on top of that, so while your 40% fee a month is a tad high for pure ad spend, it’s probably not far off if you toss in a retainer. A setup fee for a first-time customer is usually standard anymore. Pretty good price on the video creation, although you would rather have some more variation.
I am guessing at some point, someone probably said if you spend more, your fees actually end up being less because of scale. This is technically true if the fees are static.
6. Digital marketers rely upon owners, web developers, and eCommerce store managers to help them set up their stores to optimize websites for Google Ads spending. They are also necessary for tracking revenue generated through marketing campaigns. These requests can be annoying, especially if they were not communicated in advance.
— However, the better you can make your store/website look to Google, the more ads you will be able to serve for the same ad spend, show up for searches and be more relevant.
7. You seemed slightly disappointed with the total views you received, which is 100% understandable. Views are also counted differently between Paid and Organic on YouTube. Specifically, Paid Ads require the user to watch a chunk of the ad, IE 80%+. Non-skippable ads (15 seconds or less) don’t count as views. Organic views require 30 seconds of a video (the last I looked). You can find more info on paid here: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2375431?hl=en#zippy=%2Corganic-views%2Cpaid-views.
— Based on your ad spend, I would speculate that they were trying to hit a $10 CPM (cost per thousand impressions), so you would hit somewhere around 2,000,000 ads. So you roughly got a 3-4% view rate (70,423 /2,000,000) which is pretty standard but not probably what you are looking for.
8. Some food for thought for non-marketers ask/do the following:
Provide an email list for Look-A-Like targeting, generally better results than just using basic targeting from Google/FB.
— Set benchmarks for your advertising team & yourself:
— Ask what Hackstone’s average view rate is for Paid advertising and use that as your baseline for views.
— Use realistic ROAS goals. IE, what would *your* break-even point be? 2x ROAS? This sets a better expectation for everyone involved and helps see if your campaign is working correctly.
— Ask all of the questions you can possibly ask. Communication is INCREDIBLY hard, especially when dealing with digital topics. They are hard to understand and grasp.
—- Please do not take my word as gospel or as an indictment of what Hackstone provided. I have been in their position before, where sales have promised X, and we try to deliver the best we can.
Again apologies for the long post.
Gary: Thank you so much for taking the time to make such a detailed comment! I really appreciate your insights and thoughts, and I’m heading over to the ads to update the titles right now (it looks like they’re already under the “Gaming” category). Thanks for that recommendation!
Look-alike targeting can be very powerful in social media campaigns where the target demographics are hazy or tough to define but you know something about what other companies, products, or sites that target may like.
If Hackstone had confidence in that 2:1 number for another month, they would agree to fund it themselves in return for a 2:1 boost in their fees. Did you make such a proposal to them?
Anyway, my very limited experience is that advertising can buy eyeballs, but contributes almost nothing to a lasting relationship.
That’s a really interesting proposal, Dave! I might ask about that.
Do you have any data on BBG banners? Do they work for you?
The data I have from BoardGameGeek banners is just the click-through rate, which depends on the project. For Libertalia, our CTR on BGG was 0.12%. For Red Rising, it was 0.26%. For Pendulum it was 0.69%.
The variable that throws BGG banners into the shadows is blocking, as most users who support BGG get ads blocked as a perk for subscribing. As Libertalia’s name recognition is higher among more committed gamers who might be more likely to be subscribers, the chances that they got to see ads for Libertalia at all would be lower. In addition, the committed gamers who might want to pick up a long-awaited reprint would have been more likely to have found this info from sources other than a banner ad. The name recognition of Libertalia and its reprint status makes it harder to make a 1:1 comparison with results for Red Rising and Pendulum, which were both entirely new.
Watching both videos I saw a huge difference in the approach.
The “To Hunt a Killer” ad came across closer to a movie or tv trailer with suspense, live acting and drawing you into the mystery.
The Libertalia ad felt more like a typical sales ad for a mobile game that everyone just skips by. A live action “Pirates of the Caribbean” trailer style ad I think would have got a lot more attention (but of course the production costs would reflect this with no guarantee that views would convert to sales)
One marketing company that has caught my interest in Jellop who has been tied to a lot of really big campaigns. While they seem to be focused on marketing Kickstarters I was curious if you have had any experience working with them or hearing about the type of ROI they can deliver?
I’ve heard of them, James, but I’ve never worked with them.
These advertising experiments are always really cool to follow. Thanks for trying this!
Jamey, as someone who plays a lot of board games and has an interest in the business side (but no actual skin in the game), I’ve always appreciated the insight you provide in your blog posts.
I think it would be interesting to know what percentage of the purchases that Hackstone generated were from those who would otherwise not have purchased Libertalia (probably impossible to ascertain). I know I’m a sample of 1, but I can say that I personally skip the videos that are inserted before/during YouTube videos at the 5 second mark, mainly because they’re not targeting me with a product I want. Now, I didn’t see any of the Libertalia videos initially, but had I been ‘served’ the 30 or 60 second vides and not known of either Stonemaier or Libertalia (so perhaps if I was a casual board gamer?), I would have assumed it was simply an ad for a video game and hit skip. Again, sample of 1 and all that…
I find the marketing side of board games really interesting. I am personally turned off by paid previews/reviews and certainly would rather rely on the established reviewers to give me a sense of the game (regardless of their opinions…the fact of the matter is that after enough views I have a sense of why a review might like/dislike a game and how their views correlate with my own). But it seems like this was more an experiment to see if you could expand the market for Libertalia, and so video-stings could perhaps be effective. I can say that although I’m not that active on Facebook I have seen ads for Hunt a Killer there. Sending out thousands of review copies probably works well for getting *me* to buy a game, but I imagine it’s less effective at reaching a broader audience (I’m not advocating for a FB ad-campaign!).
At the end of the day, I suppose it comes down to finding the right platform and ad for the target audience…
Breakout games that appeal to nongamers such as Munchkin, Cards Against Humanity, and Exploding Kittens tend to depend on humor, cheap cost, and very light play.
Wingspan broke out, in part, because a game about birds didn’t really exist, it tapped into a more intellectual demographic that has an openness to intellectual pursuits such as thinky games, a lot of people are birders, and it got that viral “je ne sais quoi” boost that everyone dies for but finds impossible to replicate.
A game about furry aeronauts is a lot harder sell, and the target demographic is not as clear as a Munchkin or Wingspan. My family loves the original Libertalia, but it is a backstabby game, and I personally thought the reskin was confusing and diminished the “Arr!” value that made the original so good. (I’m not even sure how the reskin works for Stonemeier fans, as it seems atypical of the brand and more something Asmodee would do.) At that point, you’re looking at BGGers who have always wanted the original but were thwarted by availability (but who now may be dubious of the reskin), and that elusive non-BGG market.
The question now becomes what the demographic target is in with all those elements in play. Honestly, I can’t tell you. So I’m not surprised that Hackstone might have had a problem positioning it.
Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest is not a “reskin”. It’s a completely new edition, with every character redesigned and every mechanism examined closely and refined or redesigned. However, the misconception of it being a reskin still appears to be quite widespread for reasons beyond my comprehension.
I totally understand where you are coming from in terms of your frustrations with it being considered a “reskin”. My personal speculation (which of course is worth very little but I will share anyway) is that I think in this case the dramatic change in art direction, which perhaps was far more polarizing than you may have expected, took the focus off of the new mechanics and significant refinements.
The art is beautiful but in hindsight maybe it just was the wrong game to do it with. At any rate it is a real shame as it is one of my favorite games and I find most everyone I play it with comes away happy.
Josh: It’s a delicate situation. I think there’s probably a way we could have gone with more realistic art and made it more bright and vibrant (I think the character work in the original Libertalia is great, but the surrounding art is a little darker than necessary). But I can’t see a viable path of retaining human characters, as there’s too much potential for unintended harm. It’s for that reason that I think the game needs a layer of separation between reality and fiction.
I can relate to the experiment, Jamey. For the past few Kickstarter campaigns we have always invested in our own advertisement campaigns and we have used agencies as support. Somehow, it’s always a gamble as it is a combination of the assets (that we create ourselves to avoid additional costs), the time period (as all the ad-spend is auction based) and the product itself along with the audience of reference (a lot of A/B testing it’s done for this).
We had mixed results in the past, with an average of 4:1 and sometimes even hitting 10:1 for an entire week. Our golden rule is that if we have 2:1 or less during the first 48 hours from launch we will stop advertising with agencies and use our own marketing.
I hope that the result of this experiment will not stop you from trying again in the future. We have grown so much because of this type of marketing in the last couple of years.
I’m impressed with those conversion rates! Are they typically before, during, or after a crowdfunding campaign? Do you have any agencies you’d recommend?
Thank you, Jamey!
Before the crowdfunding, we start a marketing campaign for leads (a percentage of those leads will convert once we are live), what I mentioned above is related to ads during the campaign. We haven’t done any marketing push after the campaign is over and late pledges are normally organic. I would recommend Backerkit as they have been great for almost all the campaigns.
I’ve ran my fair share of ad campaigns (BoxThrone is mostly driven through ads) and run a few other non-board game webstores – I think the main issue is that because of their nature, YouTube ads very rarely convert (same with TikTok ads I’m finding, but that’s probably because people just don’t have the patience to click out of the app).
The problem with YouTube ads is that they play before a video, people view them as a barrier before the content they actually want to consume. They rush to skip it.
You should try Facebook/Instagram ads – they’re much better at getting clicks because the ads seems like a natural part of the feed and don’t interrupt someone’s content consumption. Facebook also has a really good ad network that will automatically get placements in news articles etc. that get opened through the app.
I mean it sounds like you’re doing fine already, but I do wonder if you could 3-4x your revenue with Facebook ads. Typically a store that gets sales naturally will get a turbo boost with ads. I wouldn’t give up on social advertising just yet!
Thanks Dan! We’ve tried several similar experiments with Facebook ads with dismal results. I’ve tried it several times and I’ve paid someone to run them, always with the same low results. I’m glad it’s worked for you, though!
Thanks for sharing the experience. As a content creator, I have tried various advertising methods and never got good results. Google ads, Twitter, Microsoft, Facebook, a few direct ad companies. I tried to grow my subscriber numbers and video traffic, nothing works. I have come to the conclusion that it’s just not worth the cost.
Extremely interesting! I am aiming to launch a KS campaign later this fall and I am looking at my options. I have done similar things before, but with a low budget. The result was negative, I did not receive back what I paid for the campaign as such.
Also, I watch videos on Youtube quite frequently and I don’t recall I ever saw an ad about Libertarian. On the other hand I saw it in my facebook feed and BGG + your blog post.
I think I will go for a success related ad campaign, I did that once with a marketing person with axemptable result. We started with a reasonable low down payment, then a budget was set. His task would be to maximise the budget result and he would receive a certain % of the final campaign result as a final payment. The better he would give a positive return of the budget, the higher the final payment for him.
Svavar: That’s an interesting approach. How do you plan to measure if the advertiser deservers the % you give them? That is, if your campaign raises $100,000, how will you know if any of that was the result of the advertiser vs your other hard-earned marketing efforts?
Purely annecdotle, but I am on YouTube watching videos almost all day, every day while I’m working. I saw that To Hunt a Killer ad pop up so many times, and I did indeed watch it (almost) all the way through on one occasion. Did not end up buying it though.
But TBH, I didn’t see a single ad for a new Libertarian. Somehow the targeting missed me.
I’m just curious, does the amount $11,726 represents gross sales or gross profit (i.e. Sales less Cost of Sales)? If that amount represents the gross sales, it means that the actual lost is greater than $19,065.
I assume it’s gross profit, but they simply listed it as “revenue” in the report, so I’m not entirely sure.
Could you check with your own analytics? Revenue could be either way, and if its just purchases it would be much lower.
I can’t see that level of tracking in Shopify.
Just curious if there was an opportunity to make the performance part of the contract. The company should be willing to stand behind their 7:1 claims, or this is a big red flag, especially since they came to you in the first place.
We talked about it a little bit, and I probably should have pushed for something like that!
Thank you so much for this, Jamey. I’ve seen a few similar analyses elsewhere (most recently by Jasper for Nut Hunt), and they typically show a loss.
Advertising consultants and platform operators seem happy to highlight the cases where advertising yields a net profit. They have a variant of statistical techniques and forms of jargon to paint a rosy picture.
But for the *typical case,* and especially for games that aren’t extremely expensive, I’ve concluded that paid advertising is a losing proposition.
I’m a marketing director for a tech company so this experiment caught my eye. I think if I were to do paid advertising with Stonemaier I’d do these two strategies.
1. Retargeting from your website. You can have someone put together a Google ads retargeting campaign for just the people who’ve come to your site already. These are usually pretty cheap ad spends that make great ROI on returning customers.
2. User Created Content. I think your games would go over well in video content like TikToks where they make short concise videos showing off the things that make your games fun. There are some agencies that specialize in working with the right creators and can target the audiences well.
I wonder what went wrong with the ad campaigns. I see DiceThrone ads all the time and know it can work for some brands.
Don’t blame you for wanting to stop after the test though.
Thanks Bryce! Option 1 is intriguing. Option 2 I think we already cover through the thousands of review copies we send to content creators each year (I know what you’re suggesting is a little different, but I don’t want to get into the “influencer” business :) ).
Yeah, as someone who’s in marketing as well (but finally out of the PPC game) I winced at the video campaign. I feel like even just doing lookalike audiences on static creatives with a modest Facebook ad budget would have performed better results wise if the goal was new eyeballs, and at half the price, if that.
I don’t know a lot about Hunt A Killer but I do know that as a heavy hobby gamer, their marketing demographic settings do not include me, even though I seem to get hit with every board game kickstarter’s paid ad budget, so something feels weird with that initial promise.
Jamey, if you’re reading the comment replies, did you get a breakdown of how many people completed watching the videos, or at what points people dropped off? (IE “only 5% of people completed the 60 second video, 20% of people got to the 45 second mark,” etc.) That could actually be useful data to have (that you’ve already paid for) when you’re creating video content (whether or not it’s for paid ads) for the next game.
I read all comments. :) I think YouTube does provide the data you asked about, though it’s the data for our teaser trailers that I look at for retention/completion rates.
Maybe if there were 2-3 minute animated episodes so viewers become invested about the backstory and world. I thought that was what the short YT videos were, then I was disappointed.
I’d love to see the animated adventures of Galecrest!
I own both the original and the Stonemaier version of the game. However, I have not actually open the new version. Seeing the video today, made me want to get it to the table, so I broke it out at lunch and played a quick game with my wife using the two-person variant. We both had fun, so I plan to take it to gameday this weekend. Not sure how this equates to sales since I am a champion and normally auto-buy Stonemaier. But I am sure I will teach the game a few times this weekend with 6 – 8 others.
Thanks for sharing this, Tony–I’m glad you had fun with your first play. Your comment is a good reminder that anything that encourages someone to get our games to the table is good for gamers and good for business! :)
Am I the only one sort of concerned that a company called Hackstone reached out unsolicited to Stonemaier Games? Hack-Stone .. Hack-Stone-Maier.
This line ” it felt like there were daily requests from Hackstone for us to do or change something about our webstore, website, YouTube channel” .. whatever they asked for, Jamey, you might ask your webdev to undo or reset. If they had access to an API to see sales, expire that permission asap.
Couple all that with Jamey getting prompts on his phone that people were attempting to login to his Apple account?
I’m sure this is all coincidence, but I’d send someone named Hackdusty right to the spam folder and I wouldn’t think on it twice… I mean, beside for the great story. :)
Dusty: I don’t think Hackstone was trying to hack us in any way. But yes, after someone is done with anything that involves access to Shopify or Google Ads/Analytics, we remove them.
I figured it was totally benign, Jamey. I just saw the wordplay and let my mind run. :) I knew y’all would be on top of it.
for anyone else who likes looking at numbers like this for ad spending, jasper at pine island games had an excellent review of his fb ad spend for his latest game, nut hunt
https://www.pineislandgames.com/blog/kickstarter-in-review-part-iii-facebook-advertising
Ouch. I feel this since this is totally in my wheelhouse, as I have been in the same position of managing promotions like this.
A few thoughts:
1. Companies that approach you out of the blue are almost never capable of delivering what they promise. That has been my personal experience. YMMV.
2. All claims of past campaign performance are either unverifiable or require so much legwork on your end as to make them not worth following up. And if you do get verification, the better question is to find out who was failed. But there may never be a way to talk with the companies that were let down and find out why and how.
3. Talk down the cost of every deal and pin everything to performance. If the contracted company can’t follow through on its promises, it either doesn’t get paid or it gets paid a percentage tied to what it was able to deliver. If the company does not agree to this up front, walk away. That seems to be the biggest miss here.
4. $30K is a lot for an unproven company.
5. YouTube views are always tied to how well a video gets pushed to the front page of YouTube, just like page rank on Google. If it’s not getting pushed on the front page, it’s not going to generate lots of traffic. Everything is about the push to targeted demographics.
6. Was an incentive attached to viewing the video? A discount?
7. Was the piece targeted to a non-BGG audience? I would think advertising to the BGG-faithful is done differently than to a potential new audience.
8. Had Hackstone ever marketed to board gamers? That takes a unique understanding of target demographic. Harder yet is understanding how to market to nongamers and creating an ad that would engage them.
👍🏼
Thanks for your thoughts! I have a few responses:
1. It’s exceptionally rare that I reply to a cold-call email, but Merritt’s initial email was personal and customized for us (it was connected to him playing Scythe for the first time).
3. I think the idea of paying for performance may have come up at some point, and perhaps there’s a metric we could have agreed upon. But ultimately I don’t think it’s fair for me to tie the expense to revenue–they can get clicks and views, but it’s our product to sell at checkout.
4. Given the examples Hackstone provided, I didn’t consider them unproven.
6. In this case, no, but Libertalia was on sale at the time.
7. I don’t know. We ran ads for Libertalia on BGG during the preorder in March, and the click-through rate was 0.12%. All of Hackstone’s CTRs were higher than that.
8. Not that I could tell, though I was looking for them to expand beyond our reach (Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest had already been reviewed across almost all major channels that board gamers would see).
4. When I say “unproven,” I mean unproven to you. The old financial company caveat is “Past performance is no guarantee of future results,” and what a company did a year ago for someone else doesn’t have much bearing on you today. Too many variables. It’s why starting small and tying to performance metrics (#3) can be a smart approach.
Thanks for sharing this insight, and the hard numbers Jamey. There are definitely publishers who see great results from paid advertising. But, it definitely doesn’t sound like the cornucopia that is often promised.
We over-committed to paid advertising for our first campaign, so I understand the frustration.
On the positive side, Stonemaier has achieved incredible success by publishing amazing games, and through your organic marketing and community building. It’s a true inspiration to us newer and aspiring publishers.
I plan on continuing to test with paid advertising, but on a more limited basis.
Thanks for sharing this Jamey, it’s always interesting to see other peoples numbers for things like this.
I’m curious, the 10,000,000 view video was a full trailer (1 min 45), while the campaign for yourself was focussed on the 15/30/60 second ad lengths. Was there any discussion around longer videos or why they didn’t do the 15/30/60 with Hunt a Killer as it seems like that would be a slightly different type of campaign?
That’s a great question, Frank. I think they made other videos for Hunt a Killer at other lengths, but that’s the video that got the most views.
The “nearly a 7:1” promise would have scared me off. That’s an insanely high number that likely reflects work done prior to Apple messing with facebook algorithms. Regardless, we all tend to quote our best work as an example of what we can create for a new customer, so I understand that. But 7:1 is very rarely seen, and I somewhat doubt it was achieved in the boardgame space.
The video is ok, if not a little slow moving, better for Kickstarter than for facebook / youtube I think. Script doesn’t seem writ or presented by or for boardgamers, as emphasis doesn’t seem to be on the more mature aspects of your games like I would expect.
All told, losing $19,000 on it surely burns, and I’m sorry you had to experience that. Surely it’s a bit less than that based on retail up-sales, but still. Sorry to hear it.
7:1 did indeed seem high! I wasn’t expecting that high; I was hoping for around 2:1, enough to cover the expense.
I’ve never spent nearly this much, but I’ve experimented with this type of marketing before and have gotten similar results as you, which has kept me away from pursuing more of it. In this example, you spent a lot of money on things that weren’t even getting your ads in front of people: $2000 setup fee, $2500/mo management fee, and $4000 for the video creation. Ideally, you can build those skills in-house and just put money into the actual impressions/clicks to get a better return. That’s the path I’ve been taking more and more lately.
This is a super interesting breakdown after reading for months about ads for crowdfunding projects. I understand this wasn’t crowdfunded, but after reading so many times that companies are spending often up to a third of what they raise on marketing alone, this article was very surprising. Do you think that campaigns like this are more effective before release? Do you feel comfortable sharing some of Libertalia’s numbers before the Hackstone campaign?
Olivia: We only have one month of non-preorder sales data for Libertalia before the campaign. In April on the US store, our Libertalia sales were $4,328 and our doubloon sales were $1,484.
As for the timing of a campaign like this, that’s an interesting question. Maybe, for the point of increasing awareness? Though then the data is muddled by all the other ways people hear about a new game.
That must be a tough comparison for Hackstone to see. Thanks for sharing. I’m glad Stonemaier’s been able to keep a steady network of people interested in your content in more organic ways.
The biggest problem I see with the ads is they dint really add anything that wasn’t already in the trailer.
The product itself is perfectly fine but in a saturated board game market the challenge is for a you tube ad like this to convey the joy the game brings to the table. Why not show real people with real emotions sitting around the table enjoying the game?
About the only ads I see these days are on YouTube. I would say the attention paid to them amounts to watching the countdown in the bottom corner until it says Skip Ad. I am more prone to check into new products if I get an email from a company mailing list or see info on Facebook/Twitter.
I feel like I just watched a board game themed episode of Mad Men. That was super interesting, Jamey!
I’ve seen those Hunt A Killer ads on my Facebook, but never clicked through on any of them because they felt kind of spammy like other targeted Facebook ads. I didn’t know there was a legitimate company behind them.
I wonder if those HAK ads worked better because it seems like a more casual game for an evening with a friend or partner rather than an investment in a more complex game? I don’t know. Very interesting!
I like the Mad Men comparison. :)