PPC Gamechanger For PC and Console Gaming Marketing

The PPC (pay per click) methods of advertisement are often quite effective. This pertains mostly to mobile games. While paid advertisement for them is often considered unethical and cringe by the general public (I’m referring to ads showing fake gameplay), it works. A lot of mobile game studios don’t even have a regular marketing department, as they opt for investing in growth departments – most marketing they do is user acquisition via PPC. On the other hand, PPC activities in the realm of PC and console gaming are nowhere close in terms of prominence they get in mobile gaming. I’ll present a single idea that could greatly enhance the effectiveness of PPC and, under some circumstances, would flip the way we do marketing for PC and console games.

The reason

PPC ads can have a whole slew of purposes and KPIs used to track them. Brand awareness campaigns could be measured by CPM (in this case – Cost Per Mile – the cost of displaying the ad to 1000 people). The KPI would help us determine how much reach we are about to achieve with the ad and the budget. 

The most used PPC format of ads in the world of PC and console gaming aims to redirect people to the product’s site and to have them take an action of sorts – usually to wishlist or to buy the game. This would be measured with 2 KPIs:

• CPC – cost per click – determining how many people got redirected to the product’s page.
• CPA – cost per action – determining how much money gets spent per each action taken.

While measuring CPC isn’t an issue (the ad platforms have no issue with counting that), CPA is an issue. The reason is that we as marketers can’t exactly measure that. Applying the code needed for that purpose (conversion pixels) is impossible. Therefore, you can’t exactly measure the actions taken by the players, at least directly via the ad platform).

Now, an important footnote. You kind of can track these things on Steam, as UTM tracking is available there. UTM tracking allows you to attach special parameters to your links and they will allow you to track whether the user conducted the action or not. This method is often used in PPC marketing outside of the gaming industry. In this case, though, it’s not ideal:

• Steam only tracks purchases made in the browser, not in the Steam app.
• The data sets for the campaign are split between the ad platform and Steam. Because of this, it can be a bit confusing to properly track user behaviour.

Having some data is better than having none and at the very least you’d be able to at least notice a trend. This method is, however, far from perfect and some results will be assumptions or at the very least not very accurate, as it’s not tracking all of the traffic and leads to having “splintered” data. Having an imperfect set of data is still better than assumptions and they are what we have in the world of console gaming, unfortunately. To my knowledge, none of the Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo storefronts have a UTM tracker and they also don’t support conversion pixels.

The world of mobile gaming works in a way that makes it all easier to do. Due to the nature of mobile phones, everything is heavily app-based and you can track user behaviour better to the point of introducing a KPI called CPI – cost per instal. This is the most crucial KPI in the world of mobile games marketing, as it allows you to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns as well as it gets. Due to the fact that it’s allowed, PPC campaigns are the go-to in this part of the industry and allow for achieving massive growth rates.

Why CPI probably won’t be introduced to the world of PC and console gaming

It’d be hard to achieve a state in which CPI would be allowed on the aforementioned storefronts. In the case of consoles, we need to remember that people rarely buy games via their PC or phone browsers. Let’s say that they see an ad and it convinces them to make the purchase. They’ll probably not even click the link and will just boot up the console, head to the store and buy the game there. It’s pretty much impossible to track and we’d be left with assumptions. The tracking would be at the very best on par with what Steam has at the moment.

Steam, however, could probably have some sort of prompt that would allow you to open the Steam app after clicking the link. You know how the browser version of Spotify prompts you with a pop-up to open the desktop app, right? It’d be something like that. I assume that this could be helpful when it comes to tracking and would make more sense, considering that a lot of people tend to buy the games in the app. Letting conversion pixels be added to the app pages would also be a game-changer. However, I believe that such features won’t be available. If they were planned, Steam would probably have already introduced them. Then, there could also be concerns regarding the protection of personal data and user privacy – an issue I’m not able to discuss in full capacity, so I’ll only point to that possibility.

A huge problem from the point of view of the storefronts would probably be allowing any 3rd party code (i.e. conversion pixels) to be added to product pages. While I’m convinced that this could be used for great purposes, there would probably be people who wouldn’t shy away from using it for nefarious purposes. This is a risk that could probably be somehow mitigated, but it exists.

Still, I’d love to see the PC and console storefronts embracing conversion pixels or maybe doing some other sorts of integration with PPC platforms. While consoles are pretty much out of the question, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to see Steam using more of them. 

If you’re in need of a PPC campaign for your game, let me know at jakub@heapsagency.com and let’s talk about cooperation. If you’d like to read about a cool PPC campaign I did a while ago, click this link. Cheers!