After announcing my game, I tried running ads on social media - with mixed results

A month ago on Nov. 1st I announced and posted the Steam page for my game - Bleaklight Falls

I wasn't expecting any media outlets or content creators to cover my announcement, but I still emailed out my press kit to a few dozen. I didn't see any of the folks I emailed post anything. But another YouTube channel, StayAtHomeDev, did include Bleaklight Falls in his weekly 5 Games Made in Godot videos (my game also won as the viewers' favorite from voting in the comments so I was pretty stoked about that!).

In the first week I also made several posts on various subreddits and facebook groups which got some good visibility. I also made a TikTok but that didn't do great at first. At the end of the first week I had ~450 wishlists, I estimate about half of which came from StayAtHomeDev's YouTube video.

After the initial spike in wishlists it slowed down a lot, getting ~10 per day for a few days. I remembered seeing some posts about success running ads on Facebook, getting about 1 wishlist per $1 spent (and later even saw a post claiming 30 cents per wishlist)

I had some issues with my facebook ads page at first, so I instead tried TikTok promote to test the waters. I posted three videos over 3 days with some gameplay clips and CTA to wishlist on Steam, got ~70k views on those videos, and a total of ~30 wishlists over three days, no better than I was getting organically, after spending $250. TikTok seemed to be a bust.

Next I tried Reddit ads. I posted This Ad on Nov. 9. I set it to target a mix of small, medium, and large gaming subreddits, and an initial limit of $50 per day. After the first day I also noticed a lot of bot traffic coming from certain countries, so I excluded those. The first few days looked very promising, getting 29 wishlists the first day, then after excluding those bot countries, 52 and 45 the 2nd and 3rd days. I decided to increase the limit to $75 per day, and over the next week I was getting ~100 wishlists per day.

As a side note, I noticed a pretty big disparity between the total wishlists per day on Steamworks' Sales & Activations Reports vs. the UTM analytics. While the first was reporting 90-110 wishlists per day, the UTM link from my ad was only showing 20-30 per day. It's hard to tell if the UTM wishlist numbers are that inaccurate or I was actually getting double the amount organically. Either way the Reddit ads seemed to be doing what I'd hoped for.

On Nov. 16th my Facebook ad page issues finally got sorted, so I posted an ad to run in conjunction with the reddit ad (the ad was almost identical as well). After a few days of the Facebook ad running, the daily wishlist additions took an unexpected dip. Despite running both ads, the total added per day went down to ~80 for a few days, then took a steep nose-dive to 35-50 per day. The UTM analytics for the Facebook link were pretty bad, getting about 7-12 per day vs. the reddit ad's 20-30, but at that point the amount from reddit was dropping fast, too.

After a little over a week and some tinkering with the audience targeting on both the ads, I couldn't justify spending $125 per day for 30-40 wishlist additions. This could be typical for running ads, to get 1 wishlist per $3-4 spent, I'm not sure. I'm also unsure of what caused the nosedive in daily additions - could be ad fatigue, or bad timing with the holidays coming up and the Steam autumn sale.

So here's some final stats:

TikTok - $250 - 3 days - <30 estimated wishlists (so bad)

Reddit - $1300 ($800 + $500 free) - 18 days - 288 UTM wishlists, 800 estimated total (pretty decent)

Facebook - $650 - 12 days - 74 UTM wishlists, 200 estimated total (meh)

As of today I'm sitting at 1635 wishlists. Since I ended both ads the daily additions have been <10 per day, some days getting 0 new wishlists. It's a little disheartening, but I have to remind myself that it's only been a month and this is just the beginning. I've also gotten a ton of positive feedback from posts I've made on reddit, facebook groups, and youtube. I'll probably continue making progress update posts, and when my demo is ready I might hire some professionals to help me market instead of doing it myself.