Peggle is a popular puzzle/action game for the PC and Xbox Live Arcade. It’s certainly aimed at the casual game market, with bright colours and cheerful sounds, but there’s plenty of playability for more hardcore gamers (if they can get over the sugar).

The basic premise of the game is to remove all of the orange pegs on the board by dropping a ball from the top of the screen. It’s similar to Japanese Pachinko games, but the pegs disappear after being hit. There are also green pegs that grant super-powers, such as multi-ball or pinball-like flippers.

There are no official sales statistics, but the PC version has been downloaded over 50 million times ^[1], and the Xbox Live Arcade has made at least 100,000 sales ^[2]. Clearly the folks at PopCap are doing something right.

Try Peggle Deluxe

References

[1] — Peggle Finds A New Home

[2] — XBLA: The Road To NPD – Xbox Live Arcade Sales For March 2009

[3] — Why poor people win the lottery

A lot of times people concentrate on getting traffic, instead of on obtaining quality traffic.

This article contains most of the traffic generation techniques I’ve used in the last few years, along with some statistics on how well they perform. Naturally, your results may differ from these, but they’re a good starting point for evaluating different methods.

All statistics are taken from an 18 month period (September 2007 – February 2009) to give as large a sample size as possible. There are nearly 1,000 different referrers for this period, so these statistics are certainly not 100% accurate. They do give a good picture of what works, which is the important thing.

Anyway, enough with the disclaimers. Each table contains four columns:

Pages Per Visit

This is the average number of pages a visitor looks at. A higher number means they look around your site more, so keep an eye on this number.

Adding relevant links to the bottom of pages, or sprinkling them throughout your content can help. Be careful not to add too many links though, so you don’t distract visitors from downloading or buying your product.

Time on Site

The average amount of time a visitor spends on your site. Again, higher numbers are better, as it generally means they’re reading and not just skimming.

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that leave your site after a single page. For example, a visitor who enters your homepage and then types another link in the address bar without following your links has “bounced”. The lower this number, the better.

Download Rate

This is from a goal I set up in Google Analytics to track downloads. A lot of my sales come from people who buy from within the demo, so the higher this number the better. If a source of traffic doesn’t produce any downloads, it’s a sign that I’m advertising to the wrong people.

As you’ll see, there’s a big difference between the best traffic sources and the worst. The most traffic to sodaware.net comes from search engines, but search engine optimisation is a big topic that I wanted to avoid, so this article concentrates on sources that are easier to control.

Paid Advertising

Google AdWords

This is one of the easiest ways to buy traffic. All you have to do is write a short textual advert about your product or website, and then target keywords that people search for. It’s quick to set up, and you know visitors are looking for what you’re offering because they searched for it.

On the flipside, there’s a lot of depth to AdWords, and it takes a long time to get really great results. Throwing down a few dollars is only the start, and you’ll lot of your time will be spent on optimising your campaigns and weeding out underperformers.

Project Wonderful

Project Wonderful is even easier to use than Google AdWords. Create a graphical button or banner, select the criteria for sites you want to advertise on and you’re away.

Project Wonderful has the advantage that ads are extremely cheap, as you pay per day, not per click or impression. It’s a good way of getting lots of hits, and the campaign option makes things even easier. However, it’s quite easy to spend a lot of money and end up with little to show if you’re not careful.

Manual bids that are tailored to each site you’re bidding on seem to work the best. They takes more work, but the responses are generally higher.

Below are stats for the top three bids I ran.

Text Link Ads

According to Text Link Ads, the real power of this method comes from the increase in search engine ranking for your site. They recommend you leave your ad running for several months to evaluate it, as search engines take a while to update.

Over a five month period, I saw no change in my ranking. Having said that, I was trying to rank on very competitive terms, so it may be better for niche phrases instead.

These are statistics from the sites that ads were placed on. As you can see, the links themselves didn’t bring particularly good traffic compared to other methods.

Free Advertising

StumbleUpon

Although you can pay for Stumbles, I’m putting it in the free category as you can get good results without paying. Stumblers generally fall into two categories: People who will stay and read, and people who will leave within a few seconds. This dramatically skews the visit time down and bounce rate.

StumbleUpon brings in a big spike of traffic at the beginning, and quickly tales off after a few days. It continues to bring in visitors over time, and sometimes you’ll get secondary spikes. There’s also the chance that visitors will stumble your other content, leading to more spikes.

For the main page, the were quite poor, but for articles and resources it works much better. Your best option is to add tips, hints or guides to your site and have them stumbled.

Articles about unique qualities of your product will perform better, as long as you go easy on the sales talk and concentrate on writing something of value.

Article Marketing

This is a simple technique, but it can have good results. The process involves writing articles that target certain keywords. Each article will contain a link to your site in the article footer. This article is then submitted to article directories, which generally rank high in the search engines. For example, if you’re selling a solitaire game you could write about tips for playing the game and include a link at the bottom of the article.

It may sound a little bit spammy, but it isn’t if you provide value to your readers.

So far this has been one of the best methods of traffic generation I’ve used. It takes effort to research and write your article, but the traffic quality is extremely high. An article I wrote over a year ago still sends a good amount of traffic which converts extremely well into downloads and sales.

Article marketing is a topic I’ll be writing more about in the future.

Blog Commenting

Find a blog that relates to your topic, and make a relevant comment that contains a link to your website. As long as your comment is useful and the blog gets a reasonable amount of traffic, you’ll get visits. Depending on your contribution, you may also develop a relationship with the blogger which can bring more traffic.

The first result in the table below is the result of a single trackback I made three years ago. It’s brought several hundred visits (and still brings in a dozen or so a week), but the traffic doesn’t convert. This technique works much better for getting blog readers rather than customers.

Forum Posting

This is similar to blog commenting, but the link to your site goes in your forum signature. Again, the benefit here comes from generating an online presence, rather than raw traffic power.

These are the top three forum referrals to sodaware.net.

"How To" blog articles

Think of a problem you face daily, and write a blog article about solving it. Its simple, quick, and if you get the title (and problem) right you can get a lot of exposure and links.

I get a lot of traffic to one "how to" in particular, but the vast majority of visitors don’t stay for anything else. This makes sense, seeing as they’re searching for a solution to a problem and not for games.

The best advice I can give is to treat this method like writing a recipe with one of your products as the ingredient. This way you’re providing something valuable, and also encouraging downloads and sales.

Link directories

I tried an automated submission programme a while ago, but I’m yet to see a single visitor from any directory.

dmoz.org is worth submitting to, but as it’s human edited it can take a while to get added.

Blog Carnivals

I’ve entered blog carnivals as well as hosted them, and the results have been a little mixed. Hosting brings in a decent amount of short term traffic, but I suspect it’s mainly people who submitted articles that visit.

It’s a good way of getting a few more readers for your blog, and be good for spreading your site around.

Game Buttons

I tried these out in my $19.95 experiment and absolutely hated them. I think they cheapened the look of the site, and most of the banners contained images I didn’t really want to see. The other problem is you have to make a lot of impressions to generate any decent amount of traffic.

Free Developer Resources

The "For Developers" section is where I put articles, source code and tools for other developers to use. It didn’t bring in much traffic to begin with, but posting about some of the resources on forums helped.

WikiPedia

This is a five minute method that works well, but if done incorrectly you’ll end up looking like a spammer, so use it wisely.

Find an article on WikiPedia that relates to something on your site, and add a link to it in the "External Links" section of the page. Remember that WikiPedia monitors links that are added, so if you don’t add value to the topic you’ll find your link nuked (and you could also be banned). For example, my interview with Hanako Games is on the Hanako Games WikiPedia page.

As with text link ads, the real benefit here is getting links and increasing your search engine ranking.

Traffic Exchanges

This one is a little hit and miss, although it’s not as bad as some of the other methods. You add your link to a directory, and its position is dependent on how many other sites you visit. For example, visiting 30 sites may put you on the first page, which will get you more visitors.

The downside is that most people are only visiting your page to increase their own rank, but the traffic isn’t as bad as I expected.

Conclusion

This is just a small sample of the various method of traffic generation techniques out there. If you’re trying to increase your site’s traffic, just remember to measure what your visitors are doing, not just how many you’re getting. Sure, it’s nice to see big numbers in your hit counter, but that means nothing if they don’t stay and buy from you.

In my previous post, I wrote about Silver Bullets, and how they’re a dangerous thing to strive for when writing software. Naturally I’m not the first person to write about them

Jeff Atwood’s “Quantity Always Trumps Quality” deals with the underlying cause of Silver Bullet Syndrome – trying to design the perfect system. When I first read the headline, I was already getting ready to disagree, but it makes a very valid point. If you’re not writing code, you’re no learning. Theorizing about best practices and architecture is all well and good, but you can only see things go wrong when you actually code them and see how they work.

“I’ll get to your application in a minute – First, we need to build the framework” by Jeffrey Palermo looks at the problem from a web developer’s point of view. The environment may be different, but the problem remains the same. Well worth a read.

Software is not a werewolf.

That might seem like an obvious statement, but how many times do developers approach a task with the mentality that there’s only one "perfect" way of doing it?

A good illustration of this is to give ten programmers a single, small problem to solve. Chances are, they will all do something slightly different. Even simple algorithms can be done in a dozen different ways. And remember, this is just small stuff here. Once you get to developing full pieces of software, the choice of solutions explodes. Just look at how many RSS readers are out there. Each one solves the same basic problem in a different way.

Games are just as likely to fall prey to the "perfect" way of thinking. Perhaps even more likely, because of there’s always the thought of "we can use this framework for every other game, so it has to be good". This type of thinking sounds smart in principle. After all, re-using code saves money and time. The only problem is that too much time gets wasted on tweaking engines instead of creating the actual product.

Start small, and concentrate on what needs doing. Don’t get caught up in trying to develop an engine that can do everything, because it’s a waste of time. Always remember that what you’re creating can be done in a million different ways, and none of them are perfect.

There is no silver bullet.

Interview: Interview with Phil Newton of Sodaware.

One of my favourite games of all time is Sonic Team’s "NiGHTS" for the Saturn. The core mechanic is very simple, and the graphics look a little ropey compared to more modern titles, but it still has oodles of charm and lots of playability. You can imagine my excitement when "Journey of Dreams" was announced, but having played it recently there was something that irritated me.

There’s too much story.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good yarn, but there’s a time and place for it. Ignoring the fact that video games tend to have sub-standard plots, there’s several deeper problems that need to be addressed.

The biggest problem is games that have a plot for no reason other than to fit in. If Space Invaders was made today, would each level need to start with a monologue about the plight of the human race? Perhaps the ending would reveal that mankind were the real space invaders, destroying other worlds for their resources. That might sound like a great plot on paper, but do we really need it?

Let’s use horror films as another example. The bits we don’t see can sometimes be the scariest. A close-up of the victim’s face, followed by a cut to their shadow and a ghastly scream is far more effective than seeing them being sliced up whilst the killer explains about how he wasn’t loved as a child. The real power of the scene lies in the viewer’s mind. Perhaps they see the attacker as a clawed monstrosity, or maybe it’s the theme park owner who’s in it for the money. The important thing is that the viewer is left to decide what really happened.

That’s my problem with Journey of Dreams.

The first NiGHTS had some great FMV which set the story up nicely. From the opening film, it becomes apparently that Claris and Elliott were talented individuals plagued by fear and nightmares. There are no cut-scenes once the game has started, and it’s pretty much left up to the player to decide on everything.

Once the final boss has been vanquished, the two main characters meet in Nightopia, but again it’s up to the player to decide what happening. Have they fallen in love, or are they just cementing a friendship from their adventures?

Sadly Journey of Dreams decided to add dialogue to the mix. Lots of it. Although I’m not keen on the voice acting, my real problem is that it doesn’t give you chance to use your imagination. For a game that’s all about dreams, it’s a shame the developers decided to go down this route.

Games don’t have to tell a story. It’s nice when they do, but there’s really no need for hours of cut-scenes and pages of dialogue for a game that’s about collecting orbs and flying through hoops. It’s an important lesson to learn: More isn’t always better.

Unnecessary story elements aren’t a huge problem in indie gaming, but that’s mainly down to the limited budgets and time constraints. What’s more important is remembering that as indies we have a lot more flexibility in deciding how we tell stories.

Take time to consider what really needs to be told, and strip out the bits you don’t need. You want people reading your story to know just enough to be interesting, whilst still leaving gaps for their imagination to fill in.

 

Apparently today is the most depressing day of the year, so here’s the Carnival of Video Game Bloggers to cheer you up! As always there’s a lot of great articles to read through and new sites to discover.

The first entry goes to the baglady over at schlaghund’s playground,  who looks at Rock Band’s uncanny valley. There’s quite a distinct degree of separation between fantasy and reality when playing games with a keyboard or a control pad, but games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band can blur the line. An interesting look at how this convergence of the game world and the real world can effect the playing experience.

Next up is Blue Skelton, who looks at The Best Video Games of 2007. It’s a video that showcases some of the best video games from last year. With so much quality in 2007, it’s easy to get overly excited about what this year will offer.

NES fans are in for a treat, as raptor looks at SydLexia.com’s 100 Best NES Games at Listosaurus Rex. There’s some classic games on the list, and the number one will come as no surprise.

If you’re a fan of multiplayer games, then you’ll love Danogo’s fascinating History of Online Games With a Big Featured Gallery. All of the classics are there, such as Neopets and RuneScape, as well as mentions of the Dreamcast which always earns bonus points in my book ;)

Chris George presents a review of Phantasy Star at Retro Gaming Hub. The original Phantasy Star really pushed the Master System, with 3D effects in the dungeons and an epic story. Be sure to check out the other reviews on the site too for a real dose of nostalgia.

If you have some spare cash and you’re wondering What technological things should you have, then bennie from Technology Matter has just the list for you!

Scott Davis from ZombieChatter.com is next in line with two articles. The first is a very positive Contra 4 Review, and the second looks at The worst NES games of all time. It’s part one of a series, and the first featured game is "Cybernoid".

As if psychically alerted to Scott’s list of bad games, the old-wizard (from Old-Wizard.com, of course) gives us his own list of the Top 20 Worst Video Games of All Time. I don’t agree with all of them, and it’s quite obvious which game is at number one, but it’s always nice to be reminded that terrible games are not a modern phenomenon.

Dale from The Gamers’ Chronicle submitted "Dan Hsu versus The Video Game Industry", which looks at how 1UP.com’s Editorial Director, Dan Hsu, responded to Midway, Sony, and Ubisoft’s banning of Electronic Gaming Monthly from receiving press material for coverage in their magazine.

The ever-reliable Jigsaw hc returns with his Blacksite: Area 51 Review. Be sure to visit Jigsaw hc’s Rants & Reviews for more rants and reviews.

John M takes a slightly different approach to video game blogging, with the "would you like to use the Internet to earn a PS3?" project at Earn a PS3. There’s a lot of ways to make money online, but if you’ve thought of giving it a go you might like to read John’s blog.

And finally, Write the Game’s K Peney gives us A History of Computer Games: The Multiplayer Years. There seems to be a lot of excitement about MMPORPG’s these days, but it’s nice to look at some of the older games and see that they’re still kicking around.

You can submit an article for the next carnival of video game bloggers using the carnival submission form, and view past and previous editions at the blog carnival index page. The deadline for submissions is February 22nd, so play some games and get some inspiration!

Technorati tags: carnival of video game bloggers, blog carnival.

Samuel presents >Nintendo Wii Controlled Smarthome posted at >Game Villa.

James Nicholls presents >Crap Internet Games Syndrome | Gaming Legends posted at >Gaming Legends.

nitesh123 presents >Which would you rather play? | MyWorldOnly posted at >Nitesh, saying, “Also includes the new 6.49 dota maps”

Michael Rosen presents >Bioshock Review posted at >The Gaming Critic, saying, “One of the most hyped games of 2007, Bioshock turned out to be one of many games to live up to most of it’s hype.”

Michael Rosen presents >PORTAL posted at >The Gaming Critic, saying, “One of the most enjoyable and thought provoking experiences you will encounter in 2007.”

Dan-O presents >How to Make Real Life Money in the Second Life Virtual World posted at >Danogo.com – Discover. Inspiring . Media, saying, “People are making millions of real dollars in the virtual real estate business. Are you missing out on the next Web gold rush?”

Samuel presents >Video Games for the Brain posted at >Game Villa.

old-wizard presents >Old-Wizard.com / Games / Video Games / Reviews / Pac-Man posted at >Old-Wizard.com.

panvamp presents >Danger of violent video games? posted at >Panvamp’s Digital Palace, saying, “This is my opinion on an recent article that compared violent video games to smoking.”

panvamp presents >On Mailboxes and White Houses posted at >Panvamp’s Digital Palace, saying, “A review of Nick Montfort’s Book about the rise of interactive fiction, some of the earlier computer games.”

Samuel presents >Halo 3 The end of a saga…NOT posted at >Sam’s View, saying, “My impressions on Halo 3 after playing through the game with a friend.”

blue skelton presents >Video Game Production Book posted at >Blue Skelton Publications, saying, “The Gamers Guidebook is a good book on video game production that provides you with a behind-the-scenes view of what it takes to succeed in the game industry with this unique guide written specifically for producers. I just ordered it from Amazon yesterday. I am taking writing for interactive media next semester and would love to write scripts for a video game someday.”

Eric Frey presents > » Quake Wars Enemy Territory: Is It Worthy? Eric Frey Dot Com: Hopes, Dreams, Ambitions And Things of Interest posted at >Eric Frey Dot Com.

Ashton presents >6 Unusual Games You Should Play Before You Die posted at >Blogs Blow Dot..

Eric Frey presents >WARHAMMER 40K: The most frustrating fun you will ever have. posted at >Eric Frey Dot Com.

Shiv379 presents >Games to look out for… posted at >Taming Entertainment, saying, “A roundup of upcoming pc games to keep your eyes peeled for.”

Shiv379 presents >Game Demos – The Decline posted at >Taming Entertainment, saying, “A critical look at the state of game demos today.”

Shiv379 presents >Game Demo Reviews posted at >Taming Entertainment, saying, “A review of some of the most popular pc game demos around at the moment.”

Ian Richardson presents >Would you like an Ezy way to manage multiple Wordpress Blogs? posted at >Make Everything EzyAs123, saying, “While a typical website can take hours to update, a site built around a blog can be updated INSTANTLY and search engines quickly take notice…”

Ian Richardson presents >Hosted Wordpress Is FREE To Install, and YOU have complete control! posted at >Make Everything EzyAs123.

Alvaro Fernandez presents >Brain Training: No Magic Bullet, Yet Useful Tool. Interview with Elizabeth Zelinski posted at >SharpBrains, saying, “Newsweek says that “computer-based brain training has shot up from essentially zero in 2005 to $80 million this year, according to the consulting firm SharpBrains”. Here goes an interview with a leading scientist.”

ppassion presents >Yoku Ruta Flash Puzzle Game posted at >Passion for Puzzles, saying, “Yoku Ruta Flash Puzzle Game”

So that’s it for this year. A big thanks to everyone who submitted articles to this carnival over the year, and I look forward to seeing you all again in 2008!

You can submit an article for the next carnival of video game bloggers using the carnival submission form, and view past and previous editions at the blog carnival index page. The deadline for submissions is January 21st, so grab those keyboards and get writing!

Technorati tags: carnival of video game bloggers, blog carnival.

Blimey, it’s carnival time already! I’m afraid I’m being lazy again, mainly because there’s snow outside and I wish to play in it before it melts away. Perhaps one day I’ll be able to make a snowman in a Holodeck, but until then outside will have to do…

L. Waymire presents The Voices of Justin Gross posted at The Shadow Council Strider, saying, “His voice is deep. It resonates lowly. Decisive consonants are articulated from the lips and tongue in a strong, focused way—the kind of focus you expect from someone with an unbreakable will. The British vowels, masculine and noble, demand loyalty of the listener. It is sometimes ruthless. It is a voice undoubtedly familiar with power… That is the voice of actor Justin Gross, as recorded for the hero-turned-villain Arthas in the video game “Warcraft III.” Find out about Gross’s experience working with Blizzard as Arthas, and how he became a voice-over actor in the link above.”

Samuel presents Perfect Dark Zero- An Underrated Classic posted at Game Villa.

Ashton presents The Simpsons: GAME posted at Blogs Blow Dot..

Sutocu presents Halo 3 Review – Xbox posted at ConsoleD.org.

Jenny presents Spent the day on RO posted at the so called me.

Jigsaw hc presents Jigsaw hc’s Rants & Reviews: Tony Hawk Proving Ground Review posted at Jigsaw hc’s Rants & Reviews.

Joe Qelqoth presents Sexual Advice Column: Penile Problems with MegaMan posted at The Cult of Qelqoth, saying, “MegaMan takes time out from blasting humanoids with his arm cannon to answer your serious questions on love, sex and relationships. Reader discretion is strongly advised.”

Jigsaw hc presents Guitar Hero III Battle Mode Tips and Strategies posted at Jigsaw hc’s Rants & Reviews.

Turnip presents Crysis Singleplayer Demo Review posted at Turnip of Power.

Turnip presents Battlefield 3: Things I would like to see improved in the next release from EA Games Turnip of Power: All things to Almonds posted at Turnip of Power.

Kabalyero presents CSI:New York meets Second Life posted at Kabalyero.

Sagar presents Top 25 Ultimate Gamer Vacations posted at Travelhacker.

Samuel presents Nokia N-Gage Returns posted at Game Villa.

Rebecca Wallace-Segall presents When one boy plays video games… he finds inspiration posted at a community of young writers in new york city.

Sarah Aswell presents The Release of Halo 3: A Day of Celebration and Remembering « BROOD posted at BROOD, saying, “my relationship with Halo, from Marathon to the release of Halo 3″

Samuel presents The History Of Arcade Games posted at Game Villa.

As always, a big thanks goes to all the contributors this month. Without your help, it wouldn’t be much of a carnival!

You can submit an article for the next carnival of video game bloggers using the carnival submission form, and view past and previous editions at the blog carnival index page. The next edition is due on the 24th of December, so get cracking on those entries!

Technorati tags: carnival of video game bloggers, blog carnival.

“If I had $19.95 to spend on advertising and I had to do everything myself, what would give me the greatest return on investment?”

Results are split into two categories, “paid” and “free”. Where applicable the number of ad impressions and clicks are shown. There are also some exciting charts and analysis at the end too.

Paid Advertising

First up we have the paid advertising, the main focus of this experiment. The total number of hits generated was quite impressive for the amount spent. Sales and newsletter sign-ups were the best I’ve seen whilst the adverts were running, so something must have worked.

Google AdWords

Total Impressions / Clicks:	4823 / 66
Clickthrough Rate:	1.37%
Cost Per Click	$0.18

I wasn’t really sure what to expect with AdWords, but I was pleasantly be surprised by the results. The cost per click was a little more than I would have liked, but the clickthrough rate was quite high for a first time ad on some pretty competitive keywords.

First time advertisers must pay a fee to set-up their account, so in effect only $9.95 of the advertising budget actually went on displaying ads.

Project Wonderful

Total Impressions / Clicks:	1037451 / 650
Clickthrough Rate:	0.06%
Cost Per Click	$0.03

Project Wonderful use an auction based advertisement model, where the highest bidder has their ads displayed on their chosen slot.

To start with I placed a few manual bids to get a feel for how the site worked. Once I was more comfortable with it, I placed a campaign to last for the rest of the challenge. The campaign feature in Project Wonderful is a massive time saver and is quite comprehensive. Simply enter the criteria for sites you’d like to advertise on, and the system will go out and bid on appropriate slots.

One thing you’ll notice is that you often go under your bid limit. The total amount spent on Project Wonderful was $18.59, so there was a little change left to run a few more slots. Another important thing to note is that the most expensive ads are not always the best. A $3 bid on a rather busy site (icanhascheezburger.com/) only brought in around 30 visits, whereas $0.57 on rpghost.com brought in over 100.

Text Link Ads

Clicks:	20
Cost Per Click	$0.85

I use Text Link Ads (affil) to generate revenue, so it seemed only right to try them out from an advertisers point of view. The ad cost $17, and with only 20 visits the cost per click wasn’t very good. To make matters worse, 80% of visitors left without clicking anything else on the site. Oh dear.

Of course, Text Link Ads is (or rather was) more about boosting search engine rankings by getting links for your keywords. Google has recently punished people who place text link adverts on their sites (including myself), so I’m not sure how this model of advertising will continue. In this case it wasn’t really worth the money, as any improvements in the site’s ranking have been wiped out by the latest Page Rank update. Oh well.

StumbleUpon

Visits:	281
Cost Per Click	$0.07

Everybody knows the WWW is a huge time waster. StumbleUpon is time wasting on steroids. By entering your interests, StumbleUpon will let you “stumble” onto sites that fit into your likes and dislikes. I use it myself and have found hundreds of new sites I never would have seen otherwise. It’s really worth installing, especially if you have Firefox.

The idea behind StumbleAds is that you pay for “stumbles” from people interested in your site’s theme. Each stumble costs $0.05, and you can set how many will be used each day, which is useful for spreading the server load.

My first try at creating a campaign was rejected for not having enough visitors to send. I found this unusual as I’d submitted it in the “Video Games” section which apparently has around 154,000 subscribers. Changing the site to “Shareware” got it accepted, and I was away. $19.95 would effectively buy 399 visitors, but only 281 showed up in the log. I assume that means a percentage of visitors blog Analytics or JavaScript.

Free Advertising

The free advertising was much harder to measure, as it came from a lot of smaller sources which don’t usually have their own reporting features. The range of traffic was quite varied, with a few surprises as well as a few disappointments.

LinkReferral.com

Total Visits

76

LinkReferral.com is quite a simple idea. Your site is placed in a directory, and its position within this directory is dependant on how active within the community you are. By visiting other member sites you gain places, which improves your exposure. Writing (good) reviews and helping in the forums also improves your rank. Other members can also review your site so you get feedback.

Naturally it doesn’t work quite like that. Plenty of reviews consist of “Great site link me kthxbye”, and there are a fair few sites which are…below average. Having said that, for the amount of work it’s a good way of getting feedback and a few hits. Some of the reviews are quite useful, and I’ve had a few website errors pointed out by members.

Traffic wise, the bounce rate (number of people leaving without interacting) is about the same as StumbleUpon’s, which isn’t as bad as I was expecting.

Link Bait

Total Visits

965

Link baiting is the process of crafting articles and content with the deliberate intention to attract a big response. For an idea of what these articles are like, check out the front pages of digg or reddit.

The article that worked for me was “Game Design Lessons: Halo“, and a quick email to the editors at the excellent halo.bungie.org quickly got me over 800 visits. There were also a few referrers from other Halo fan sites as the link spread. Sadly Bungie didn’t visit my house with cake and an Xbox 360, or even and Xbox 360 cake. Maybe next time.

The only other attempt at link bait was the Pirate Week series of posts, which didn’t exactly set the Internet on fire. The Carnival of Video Game Bloggers also brought in a few visitors, but nothing compared to the Halo post.

Flashing Banners

Total Visits

190

You might have seen the square adverts if you’ve visited Flash arcade websites. Most of them animate far too quickly and include gratuitous flashes of cleavage to grab the viewer’s attention.

I’ll be honest. I ran the ads on this blog for a week and then had to remove them because I felt they were just too horrible. They were generating no traffic and made the place look untidy. I didn’t actually realise that one of the services (moregamers.com) gave out 50,000 free credits after a week of posting, which is where all 190 visits came from. Never again.

Forum Posts

Total Visits

13

I didn’t exactly go overboard with this technique, but I was still surprised at how poorly it did. I went for a more indirect approach with links in signatures and profiles instead of in actual posts, so perhaps that explains the poor response rate. It’s worth a try, but links need to be promoted a little more.

Blog Comments

Total Visits

0

:(

The Big Conclusion

Out of all the advertisements, creating link bait brought in the most visitors. However, most of them only stayed for the article and then left so sales weren’t really affected. Project Wonderful brought in lots of traffic from a wide variety of sites, and AdWords had a decent clickthrough rate and brought good visitors.

I promised charts, didn’t I?

Exciting, isn’t it?

And finally, two heat maps from before and after the ad campaign (click for bigger images).

Before 1779 visits / 557 clicks

After 3021 visits / 1222 clicks

The links to Cute Knight and Aveyond attracted a lot of clicks, especially from visitors referred by More Gamers. It must be the pretty pictures (and the fact that they rock).

So where does this leave things? As someone who’d never advertised online, it was easy to get started and quite nice to watch traffic appear with no more effort once the payment had been made.

One thing that’s worth pointing out is that it’s quite easy to blow a lot of money on advertising and see virtually no return. Different advertisers bring in different visitors, and spending money (or even time) on the wrong audience will quickly drain your resources.

From that perspective, Google AdWords brings in some of the most targeted visitors as they’re already looking for what you’re selling. Project Wonderful brings in a lot of traffic at a very low price, so it’s a great place to get started.

StumbleUpon didn’t perform nearly as well as I would have liked, but the content really wasn’t targeted well for StumbleUpon audience. Individual, focused articles tend to do much better than site front pages. In the past I’ve seen articles bring in thousands of visitors within a few hours, so it’s worth using to get some good exposure.

Text Link Ads were the biggest disappointment for me. The recent Google update hasn’t helped matters, but I did see a slight improvement in my search engine rankings shortly after the ad went live. A few well placed ads might still work for other search engines, but it takes a while for the visitors to show up.

The free advertisers weren’t as bad as expected. LinkReferral.com brings in a trickle of traffic, although the site users are looking for free advertising so may not be the biggest spenders. Some reviews are helpful though, and you may be able to build contacts if offering services and products to webmasters.

I still hate those flashing banners, even though they brought in nearly 200 hits. I really don’t see how they’re worth it for most sites as you have to generate around 100 impressions to get a single click. If you’re getting enough impressions to get a worthwhile amount of visitors from them, you really don’t need the help ;)

Forum posts and blog comments didn’t really do much for the traffic, but they’re easy to make and they may just catch someone’s eye. A few recommendations between friends can do more for your business than any amount of paid advertising.

More business articles: Sodaware.net – Article index