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How do I increase the impressions for my game?

A topic by Johnny Dalvi created Jan 14, 2020 Views: 2,364 Replies: 7
Viewing posts 1 to 6
(+2)

Hello Guys,

So, I have a game with a high CTR (usually sits around 30%~40%), although the number of impressions is kinda low (32 impressions in the last 7 days), and most of the dowloads came from people searching from it's exact name either on the itch.io search engine or through google. I've added all the tags and did my best to improve the SEO, The game also did fairly well on the jam it was submitted for (57th out of 2600 games), and it was also placed very low when someone browses through (under 1000) the jam entries for some reason. The name of the game is Bullet Bender if someone want to take a look.

What does itch.io takes into account for the sorting of the games overall? Is there something that I can make to improve it?

Thanks

Admin(+1)

With impressions that low it’s really hard to make any conclusions about the CTR. Overall CTR fluctuates a lot depending on where your project is appearing. A game on the homepage is going to have a much lower click through rate just because the traffic to the homepage is untargetted, versus someone who is on your profile page looking at your work who is likely to click on one of your projects.

As for getting more impressions: using wide range of accurate tags, encouraging people to interact with your page (like rate it after they’ve played it), and making a game that people like.

Sorry I don’t have a more specific answer

Thanks for your reply leafo!
Yeah, it makes sense that the CTR is high because of low impressions. I'll ask for my players to rate it, perhaps it could increase the amount of impressions it gets.

Impressions are usually going to be low unless your game's either exceptionally good and interesting to people, or you promote it outside itch.io. 

Don't expect a lot of people to simply stumble onto what you are doing, sometimes you need to tell them that it exists. Otherwise it'll get lost in the mountain of other assets and games. 

Also, if you have a bunch of different stuff released it helps as you can sort of cross-promote a bit. In my experience the more listings you have - quality ones - the more likely people are to find you. But yes, you will need to promote your work somehow.

In my case I've certainly done plenty wrong but my page https://matthornb.itch.io has gotten thousands of views over the past year so it's not all bad for me - though I've only made 17 sales so far and nobody's rated anything of mine, I guess they don't want to take the time to do that. I suspect even one or two ratings would boost response significantly, that sure happened after my first rating on Etsy and it definitely happened about 3 years back on my eBay shop as well.

Right now I'm encouraging people to rate my asset packs - by pledging 5 hours of added work adding to them with free updates for every rating, one hour for every comment, and an hour for every social media Twitter retweet/Facebook post about it. But even so, not clear if that will be effective. I'e got everything on sale 50% off individually and $0.99 for the five packs combined. Not games, asset packs for game devs, though I'm also trying to wrap up a few indie game projects in the background. This sort of pledge makes sense to me, those ratings, comments, and shares can pay off big in the long term.

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Yeah, I also have a few thousands of views on my page https://johnnydalvi.itch.io/, most of it was unorganic (people looking for the game through google or through itch.io search), and then some due to tags and just a few due to collections.

That's a nice thing that you do with your rating system in there, I also feel that I should do more about it, at least prompt the player to go to the game page and rate it (perhaps I'll even add a link to my games >.<).

Thanks for sharing your experience with this matter Matt :)

This stuff feels like sorcery to me, is there a “It’s actually really simple, dumdum” guide for people such as myself?

There are a bunch of videos talking about overall marketing (GDC yt channel has a few of them), but I'm afraid that the organic aspect of it is quite a sorcery to me as well. Perhaps it increases organically if it already has high traffic due to being a hit or through our marketing.

Nice, thanks. Will check those out.

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