I wanted to write a second part for marketing games with paid ads because strategy, goals and budget are only half of the story. You can’t set a paid ad live without selecting an audience, adding some creative content and knowing what you’re measuring. Unfortunately, lots of people forget about these things and don’t prepare anything before opening the ad platform, and their results reflect this.

Before you set your paid ads live, most ad platforms require you to select your targeting and provide at least one image, video and text. So that’s what we’re going to cover here, along with a task that is even more overlooked; measuring the results and optimising your ads during the campaign so that they might perform better as time goes on.

If you haven’t read the first part of this article, I implore you to do so because strategy, goals and budget are important precursors to targeting, ad creative and measurement.

At this stage, it’s important to reiterate a message from Part 1:

Before you even consider paid advertising, start at least one social media account for your game or studio and update it regularly. With that said, let’s dive into choosing the audience targeting for your ads.

Targeting Paid Ads

A big mistake people make with paid ads is forgetting that most people who play games have a vivid and varied life outside of gaming. Remembering this fact is the key to choosing who you want to show your ads to.

Choose a random game from your library, does it align with any of your interests outside of gaming? What might someone assume you’re interested in if that’s all they had to go by?

These are the types of things you should be thinking about to build up a profile of your potential players before you even open the ad platform you’ve chosen. Apart from playing video games, what other interests could the people who play your game have? Do the themes of your game indicate what your audience might like outside of gaming?

Advertising organisations like Meta and Google are continuously profiling users and gathering data about their interests which means they have hundreds of targeting options ranging from generic to niche groups.¹ This almost gives us too much choice and it can easily get overwhelming trying to choose the best options, but if you’ve got an idea of your player’s interests before facing these options, you’ll be able to swim through them efficiently instead of drowning.

Luckily it’s more common for ad platforms to use machine learning to refine targeting even further. The machine learning algorithm will use data about the types of people who interact with your ads and find more of those people to show your ad to. This is especially useful if the audience you’re targeting is a large group.

Targeting is very dependent on advertising budget. If you only have a small budget, you might not be able to pay for enough ad interactions for the ad platform to learn who is more likely to be impacted by your ad. You might want to make your audience more specific if you can, but making your audience too small has its own problems. Your assumptions about the people who would like your game might be wrong leading to very few people interacting with your ad. This means the ad platform could run out of people to test within the characteristics you’ve given it. It’s a bit of a balancing act.

As well as interests, simple demographics like age and location are important to narrow your targeting. A great starting point is the demographic data from people who visit and interact with your social media profile(s). If YouTube Studio is showing that people who watch your videos are mostly aged between 25-54, you could exclude anyone under 25 from seeing your ads because they are less likely to be interested.

Once you’ve decided who the people are that you’re going to target, it’s time to think about the creatives and messages that are most likely to resonate with them.

Showcase Your Game With Intentional Ad Creative

Let’s bring it back to the marketing funnel from part 1. Paid ads usually sit at the awareness stage, meaning that most people who see your ad will have never seen or heard of your game before. Think about how you would introduce your game to a stranger and then tailor this to your audience profile that you built in the section above - what features and benefits would be important to them?

It may be tempting to just use the trailer(s) you’ve made for your Steam store page, but in a world where we encounter around 100 ads per day,² our attention span is limited and people are less likely to make it past 5% of your trailer if it’s over one minute long. Even shortening your trailer might not be enough; studies have show that people may watch just under 5 seconds of a video on social media before moving on.³

As a minimum for video ads, you want to capture your audience’s interest within the first 3- 5 seconds and include a call to action such as “wishlist on Steam” to make it clear to viewers what they should do next. ^4,5 Make sure you familiarise yourself with the best practices of the ad platform you choose as people will act very differently towards ads on TikTok compared to Reddit, for example.

To guide creating your paid ads, whether they are videos, static images, or both, consider including at least one of these features:

• Unique selling points (USPs): Show people what makes your game different from similar games
• Benefits of playing your game: How will it make the player feel and use appropriate footage or stills to communicate this
• Brand image: Communicate the personality of the game or your studio
• Pre-emptive: Make a claim about your game that can be evidenced, for example if your game is the first to do something specific like combining mechanics or using a new piece of technology

You could make one ad per feature to test which works best for your game. Whether you do this or not, it’s good practice to create different versions of ads to give the ad platform a choice to test different ads on different types of people within your targeted audience. If you only have one ad, you have to be really sure that you’ve got the messaging and content right for your audience.

When you’ve made a few different variations, with different messages and framing of your game, ask yourself these questions before you upload them to your chosen ad platform:

• Will the creative resonate with the audience I’m targeting?
• Does the ad communicate the right features and benefits about my game for my audience?
• Are all of the elements such as colours and fonts the same style as my game?
• Is the call to action obvious and simple?

Unfortunately, the process of creating paid ads doesn’t stop with uploading your creatives. To make sure your campaign is running smoothly and you’re not wasting money, you’ll need to measure your progress towards your goals and make tweaks to improve performance.

Measurement & Optimisation

As you can gather, paid ads take time to prepare and create. After you’ve released them into the wild, it would be nice to know whether the effort you’ve put into them is paying off, or whether there are some things you can tweak while they’re live to make them run better and spend your budget more efficiently.

First, make sure you know which metrics are important to help you track progress towards the goals you set in Part 1. You might need to measure the number of people you reach, the number of clicks achieved or purchases and wishlists. If you’re behind on your goals, you’ll need to know which creatives and messages are letting the side down, or which audiences aren’t engaging with your ads.

Ads platforms want your ads to do well and usually provide basic analytics for metrics that they can measure on their side such as clicks and impressions, but if you want to measure whether your ads resulted in any direct purchases or wishlists, you’ll need to invest some time into different ways of tracking ad performance.

Tracking Links for Steam Store Pages

Luckily, Steam allows game developers to use UTM links to track where wishlists and purchases come from.⁶ You can set up a UTM link with your game’s Steam store page as the destination using tools like Google Analytics' Campaign URL Builder and enter different parameters to help you track the performance of different ads and campaigns:⁷

Parameter	Definition	Example Input
Source	The ad platform that the ad is being run on	reddit
Medium	The type of ad the link is attached to	banner
Campaign	The reason behind running the ad	game launch
term	If you’re running search ads, this is the search keyword that the ad shows for	multiplayer games
content	The message and/or imagery that is shown in the ad	buy now main character

 

To test your UTM link and track the results of your ad for your Steam page, follow these steps:

1. Select your game in your Steamworks dashboard
2. Scroll down to the Marketing Tools & Visibility section
3. Select Marketing & Visibility.
4. In the selection of tabs under your game’s name, select UTM Analytics
5. Click “Test a UTM Link” to make sure it meets the requirements for Steam to use it for analytics

After you’ve got your tracking sorted, double check that your completed ads appear as you imaged them to when you designed them - usually ads platforms have a preview tool for this. Once you’re happy, you’re finally ready to set your ads live!

Optimisation After The Learning Phase

Don’t just set and forget, use the analytics available on the ad platform and on Steamworks to make sure everything is working smoothly and people are being shown your ad. You should start to see impressions in the first 24 hours of pressing go on your ads.

With all ad platforms, you’ll need to let the algorithm behind it learn who is best to target and which ads to target them with. The length of the learning phase differs between ads platforms so make sure you check the help pages to make sure you don’t make changes too soon. Every time you make a change, you throw the ad platform back into the learning phase.

After the learning phase, review the performance using your key metrics and investigate any ads that aren’t working. You could swap them with different ones and you can even swap out audiences that are under-performing or add some new ones to test. Only do this if your budget allows your campaign to run for longer than the learning period after you’ve made the change.

If you don’t allow the algorithm to learn between changes, the ad platform won’t have enough time to adapt to your new approaches, give you reliable results for the changes or allow you to reach your targets. From my experience, there is a fine line between optimisation and preventing your campaign from performing at all.

Recap: The Paid Ads Process

Hopefully, this two-part series helps you to avoid making mistakes with paid ads if you decide to use them to market your game. The reality is, paid ads aren’t for everyone and they only give you as much as you give them. Follow the process outlined in these articles but make sure to do more research to make the right decisions for you and your game.

In Summary:

1. Make sure paid ads fill a gap in your marketing instead of being the only marketing you do
2. Set realistic goals for your paid ads based on click through rates, conversion rates and budget
3. Write down the characteristics of your target audience based on the themes of your game
4. Choose an ad platform that your audience uses, helps you achieve your goals and spends your budget effectively
5. Create ads that specifically speak to your audience and tell them to take an action
6. Make sure you know what and how you’re measuring your ad performance to track your progress towards your goals
7. Let the ad platform learn how to optimise performance before you make any changes

If this series helped you to run a successful paid ads campaign, we’d love to know! So tag us on Bluesky or Twitter when you shout about your success.

References

1. VidHoarder | The Ultimate List Of Google Ads Targeting (Complete List Of Audiences, Topics, and More!)
2. The Drum | How many ads do we really see in a day? Spoiler: it’s not 10,000
3. Social Media Knowledge (SMK) | [STUDY] Facebook Video Watch Time: 4.57 Seconds On Average
4. Google Ads Help | Demand Gen campaign asset specs and best practices
5. Meta Business Help Centre | Best practices for mobile video ads
6. Steamworks Documentation | UTM Analytics
7. Google Analytics Help | [GA4] URL builders: Collect campaign data with custom URLs
8. Google Analytics Help | [GA4] URL builders: Collect campaign data with custom URLs