We are exposed to adverts wherever we go and whatever we do. Each day you might encounter around 100 ads of different types and recall none of them.¹ Every business wants our attention, but we’re increasingly unwilling to give it.

Paid ads are a popular way for businesses to get our attention by buying it, but although it might seem like a quick win to spend some money on getting in front of people, running a successful paid ad campaign requires more planning than just deciding how much money you want to part with.

Every now and again, someone will take to a game developer subreddit and post something like “I spent $100 on ads… here’s what I achieved” or people posing the question as to whether paying for ad space is really worth it for their game.

There are some common mistakes that people make including lack of strategy, forgetting to set goals and improper budgeting. Long story short, if you put some thought behind your ads as well as money, you might find that they can be worth it.

Your Game Marketing Strategy

When was the last time you noticed a paid ad like a banner ad? When was the last time you clicked on a paid ad and bought something from it straight away? If you’re scratching your head trying to answer these questions, that is completely normal.

The questions above highlight one of the biggest mistakes of paid ads; we forget our own behaviour towards them and expect others to act differently. Why would a potential player be more likely to notice your ad, click on it and wishlist your game, all in one go, if you’ve never done it yourself?

If you take one thing from this article, it’s that paid ads shouldn’t be used on their own, they should be the sprinkles on top of your marketing cake. If you don’t currently have any organic (free) marketing activity such as videos on a YouTube channel, posts on Instagram or behind the scenes on X, this is what you need to start with before you even consider paying for ads.

Why? Because wishlisting a game and then actually purchasing it is the final stage in the customer behaviour process known as The Purchase Funnel.

The Purchase Funnel

Paid ads such as display and video ads usually sit at the awareness stage to try and get as many eyes on your game imagery as possible and let your audience know your game exists. You can drive consideration with these types of ads too, but this comes with exposing people to your ads multiple times which can get expensive. This is called the Mere Exposure Effect where players start to associate your game with their need to play a game after repeated, consistent exposure to your marketing.²

For mere exposure to work properly though, you need to make sure you have content across the internet that covers other stages of the purchase funnel. You might have the purchase aspect covered with a Steam store page, but once people are aware of your game, how will they find information to help inform their decision to wishlist and purchase it?

If someone searches for your game, you want them to encounter different sources of information besides your Steam store page. Your store page is your shop front, but people can be fickle and need more than just the “hard sell”.

Marketing is mainly about developing a relationship with customers; you give them something and in return, they purchase your game. For example, a social media account with behind the scenes content of your game’s development might encourage someone to wishlist your game and keep up with developments.

Whatever channel you choose, create content to build an emotional connection with players. If you just have paid ads that lead to a Steam store page or your game’s website, you’ve told them what to buy, but you haven’t told them why to buy it. You need to help potential players care about your game enough to wishlist and ultimately purchase.

Actions You Can Take Now

Before you even consider paid ads, create at least one social media account that you update regularly with posts about your game in development. A good organic marketing base is priceless. It will help you connect on a human level with potential players which will drive people to go beyond an initial wishlist and purchase the game when you release it.

If you’re struggling for ideas, you could use a market research tool like our Data Explorer to find games similar to yours that were successful and investigate their social media presence to understand what strategies worked for them. This will help you understand which social media channels they used and the types of content they shared.

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Setting Goals For Marketing Your Game

A lot of paid ad problems stem from not being clear about what you specifically want to achieve from them. The overall goal of marketing your game is for people to purchase it, but it’s unlikely this will happen directly from paid ads where people are right at the start of discovering you. Even expecting a wishlist from people who see and click on your paid ads is a tough ask.

Search ads might yield some results because these sit lower down the funnel in the the consideration phase, but the volume and intent for search queries relevant to your game might not be there, and you might just be wasting money, especially if your game isn’t out yet.

When you consider paying for ads, ask yourself what you really want to achieve from the ads themselves. Do you want to:

• Drive awareness of your game
• Drive traffic to your Store page or a website (consideration)
• Drive wishlists or purchases of your game (conversion)

Deciding between these things will help you to choose the right ads platforms and types of ads to spend money on to achieve your goal efficiently.

As previously mentioned, it is difficult to inspire people to purchase or wishlist a game directly from a paid ad, but many ad platforms use machine learning to help you achieve the goals you tell them you want to achieve. For example, display and video ads run on the Google Ads platform can be used for all three of the goals above, but you need to be specific and select the right settings when you create the campaign.

If you want awareness, choose the ad platform where you can find your audience more easily and get the most views for your budget. If you want to drive traffic or convert people into paying players, then use the table below to help you decide which platform might be best for you. Banner ads (also known as display ads) deliver marginally better click through and conversion rates than video ads, so I’ve tried to split them out where possible.

In most cases, ads platforms recommend that you create a campaign with both static and video creatives to get the best results so it’s likely you would report somewhere between the display and video rates shown below.

Click-Through & Conversion Rates for Different Ad Platforms

The percentages below are averages across all industries, including gaming, so that you can get a rough idea of what can be achieved. I wasn’t able to find statistics for everything, and different sources often cite different rates (very unhelpful), but you can view all our sources in the references section at the end of this blog if you want to start your own research.

The click through and conversion rates will vary greatly depending on your final targeting, the specific placements on each platform and whether you optimise your campaign while it’s running. For example, click through and conversion rates vary more depending on whether they appear in a scrolling feed or in stories. ³

Ad Platform	Ad Type	Average Click Through Rate	Average Conversion Rate
Google	Display	0.46%	0.55%
	Video	0.74- 0.81%	0.05-0.50%
Facebook	Display	0.90%	9.21%
	Video	0.50-0.73%	Unknown
Instagram	Display & Video	0.22- 0.88%	1.08%
X	Display & Video	0.86%	0.77%
Reddit	Display	1.81%	Unknown
TikTok	Video	0.84%	0.46%

On the surface, Meta Ads (Facebook and Instagram) has the better conversion rate and ad placement options, but Google isn’t far behind. Remember that each platform targets people while they’re doing different things; socially scrolling (Meta) and going about their daily online life (Google). The differences between each platform has consequences for the cost of advertising there. Before deciding on your perfect ad platform, consider the costs of each view, click and conversion to make sure you get the most out of your budget.

Plan Budgets Before you Buy Ads For Your Game

Typically, advertising will cost more the further down the purchase funnel you set your sights. As you’ll see below, it costs a lot more to get 100 clicks than to get 100 views. This is mainly because the ad platform has to work harder to find the types of people to carry out each action; views (impressions) are the easiest because they just have to show your ad to people. Only a fraction of people who see your ad will click on it and even fewer people will wishlist or purchase your game after clicking.

All this will tie together soon, but first, let’s look at the potential costs of advertising your game.

Pricing Types and Average Costs per Platform

The main pricing models for paid ads are:

• Cost per thousand views (CPM) - paying for people seeing your ads (impressions)
• Cost per click (CPC) - paying for visits to a website or Steam page
• Cost per acquisition (CPA) - paying for wishlists or purchases

Most ads platforms operate on a CPM or a CPC basis because they’re the easiest actions to track from the advertiser’s point of view. If you want to work to a CPA, you’ll need to implement tracking elements on your website like the Meta Pixel, to feed data to the ad platform and allow it to learn what drives purchases and what doesn’t.

The average CPMs and CPCs are below, and you can work out a cost per acquisition using this formula:

Ad Platform	Average CPM	Average CPC
Google	$3.42	$0.63
Facebook	$8.00- $14.00	$0.63
Instagram	$5.00- $8.00	$0.40- $0.70
X	$1.17	$0.38
Reddit	$1.50- $10.00	$0.50- $2.00
TikTok	$3.21	$0.20- $2.00

Buying views on any platform is much more affordable than clicks, so this is something you should consider if you only have a small budget and are creating organic marketing content such as posts on X as well.

If conversions are your main goal for paid ads, you must make sure that your cost per purchase is lower than the cost of your game otherwise you’re in danger of losing money rather than making it. This is the main reason why you can’t just rely on paid ads to encourage people to play your game, and I’ve tried to illustrate this in the next section. Free channels will balance out the cost of paid ads by encouraging people to purchase your game at no cost to you other than your time, meaning that your cost per conversion comes out lower overall.

What if You Spent $100 on Display Ads?

It’s the question that everyone is asking, but I want you to take the following results (and any results people report) with a pinch of salt. They are very rough calculations using average CPMs, CPCs and conversion rates featured in this article to give you an idea of what you could get and how much a resulting conversion would cost.

Please remember that every paid ad campaign is unique, resulting in very different views, clicks and wishlists or purchases.

Ad Platform	Impressions	Clicks	Conversions	Cost per Conversion
Google	29,240	159	0.87	$114.55
Facebook	9,091	159	14.6	$6.84
Instagram	15,385	182	1.96	$50.93
X	85,470	263	2.03	$49.35
Reddit	17,391	80	Unknown	Unknown
TikTok	31,153	91	0.42	$239.13

 

Apart from Facebook, the costs to get someone who clicked on your ad to wishlist or purchase your game are extortionate. If you only ran paid ads to market your game, you’d need to charge players $50- $250 for your game to make any sort of profit. If your game isn’t released and you’re paying for wishlists, you’ve got to take into account the conversion rate from wishlist to purchase and it’s unlikely that every wishlist will result in a purchase.

Imagine you ran a campaign to generate wishlists on Instagram and you spent $100. Using the table above, your cost per wishlist is around $50, but you would need a wishlist to purchase conversion rate of 50% to get just one purchase of your game from this campaign. In this scenario, a wishlist cost you $50, but one purchase of your game cost you the whole budget of $100!

How to Plan Your Ad Spend

No matter how much you have available to spend on advertising, make sure you know what you could get out of it before you set your campaign live. That way you won’t be disappointed with the results and you can plan to fill in the other parts of the purchase funnel with free marketing activity to balance the costs.

You could work backwards and start with the number of impressions, clicks, wishlists or purchases you’re looking to achieve and find out how much that would cost you on each platform.

You should also consider whether your budget allows enough time for people to notice your ad, take interest and remember it. Typically, a player might need to be exposed to your game’s content up to thirteen times before they even consider buying it. ²¹

Which Ad Platform Should You Choose for Marketing Your Game?

Don’t just go with the platform you’re most familiar with if it won’t help you achieve your goals. The platform you choose will ultimately depend on what you want to get out of it, who you want to target and what marketing you’re already doing.

In the second part of this blog, I’ll talk about three more mistakes that people make with paid advertising; targeting, ad creative and measurement. In the meantime, ask yourself if paid advertising is still for you and if it is, which platform will meet your goals and use your budget effectively?

Methods

References

1. The Drum | How many ads do we really see in a day? Spoiler: it’s not 10,000
2. Choice Hacking | What is the Mere Exposure Effect?
3. Sprout Social | Instagram statistics you need to know for 2024
4. Save My Leads | Average Meta Ads CTR
5. Inteliqo | Facebook Video Ads Statistics in 2024
6. WordStream | Google Ads Benchmarks for YOUR Insdustry
7. Social Shepherd | 19 Essential Google Ads & PPC Statistics You Need to Know in 2024
8. Store Growers | YouTube Ads Benchmarks (2024)
9. First Page Sage | Google Ads: Average Clickthrough Rates in 2025
10. Forecom | Guide to Advertising on Reddit - Reddit Ads
11. Mega Digital | Improve Ad Performance with TikTok Ad Benchmarks 2024
12. easyInsights | X (Twitter) Ad Campaigns – The Most Important Metrics to Track and Optimize
13. Business Dasher | Here’s the Average Conversion Rate Benchmark For Major Advertising Platform
14. Brafton | Social Advertising Benchmarks for 2024
15. Staista | X's Bargain Basement Advertising
16. Varos| Google Ads CPM
17. Lebesgue| Facebook vs. Instagram Ads
18. Getuplead| How Much Do Reddit Ads Cost? (+How to Control Your Spend)
19. Lebesgue| TikTok Ads Benchmarks for CTR, CR, and CPM – 2024 Update (+How to Control Your Spend)
20. Business of Apps| Cost Per Click (CPC) Rates (2024)
21. Decryption| Consumers View Ads This Many Times Before Making a Purchase