5 Tips For Using PPC NFT Ads To Increase Your NFT Game’s DAU

NFT Ads Overview

Need help with PPC NFT Ads?  We can help!  The gaming space is inherently competitive, and web 3 games do not live in a vacuum by themselves.  In order to compete in the overall gaming marketplace, it requires an advertising budget above and beyond that of paying scholars / players in junk coins that eventually become next to worthless due to excessive emissions and unhealthy yield farming. What this all boils down to is that you need to have an actual advertising budget in place to acquire new players.  Just like a business needs new customers and dollars coming in the door, games need a process for acquiring new players consistently.  As an NFT game, the easiest time to acquire paying customers is during your NFT mint.  And, the easiest time to acquire new players and scholars is when your token is actually worth something. But, where do you go after that? Here are 5 tips for using advertising to increase your NFT game’s DAU:  

Tip #1 – Leverage Guilds

I actually own one of the largest NFT guilds in the world called BreedFi.  So, if you want to shoot the breeze and talk about the guild side of things, feel free to go to the Contact Us page on this site and I can dive into this a bit more with you. Everyone tries to get guilds on their side to buy their NFTs and bring revenue in the door.  But, few games run ads that help guilds keep their inventory of NFTs booked.  There is nothing more frustrating as a guild than having thousands of NFTs sitting in your wallet not being used.  The only other thing that comes close is being a guild and renting out your NFTs knowing that the game’s economy is yield farming based and that your scholars are dumping the token, taking an exit, and ruining the game.  For that reason, we currently try to focus only on games that have entry fees paid in stable coins (USDC, USDT, BUSD, etc.) or network tokens (ETH, WETH, SOL, BNB, etc.). If you’re considering having an advertising budget for your game, one route worth testing is running ads on networks like YouTube, Facebook, etc. and sending those leads to guilds to follow up with.  Some of your top guilds would love to have fresh scholars coming in the door to rent out their NFTs to.  And, those fresh players help increase your DAU.  

Tip #2 – YouTube NFT Ads

One of the first advertising options to consider is YouTube for NFT ads.  Most NFT games have created some type of a trailer to help people understand that game.  Taking that trailer and turning it into a sponsored ad that plays on the channels of other NFT games and even web 2 games is a great way to gain exposure and bring more players into your ecosystem. Just make sure that you are clear on what your Call To Action is.  If you’re trying to sell NFTs via the video, make sure that you send them to a place where they can actually purchase an NFT with a credit card or crypto.  

Tip #3 – Facebook NFT Ads

This tip is a bit trickier because Facebook doesn’t actually allow you to run crypto NFT ads on their platform.  However, they do allow for normal games to advertise and send traffic to the Apple Store or Google Play Store.  So, if your game has a web 2 version that is available to non-NFT holders, this can be a great option for you. In fact, if your game doesn’t currently have a web 2 version, this is something to highly consider.  Having a mobile version of your game along with a web 2 version where people can play for free and then upgrade to becoming a paid player is key. Blockchain technology is great.  But, sometimes it overcomplicates things.  What players really want is:

1. Ownership of their in-game character and skin assets
2. Earn real money for winning games and tournaments

One of my favorite things to do as a guild is do daily tournaments with my players where they earn USDT for playing fun games like Binamon Firewars.  We host our own servers an and people earn for winning.  Fractal does a good job of this with games like EV.io and Undead Blocks.  We see tournament play being a big part of the future of blockchain gaming.  

Tip #4 – Fix Your Rewards System

One of the tragedies of NFT gaming is that by the time your game starts to gain traction, your token is typically dead. That’s because defi-based yield farming games like Axie have economies that are more like Ponzi Schemes than anything else. Players and Scholars in essence just take the rewards you give them and immediately dump them.  You can actually tell how popular a game was by how low that token price is.  It’s fascinating how many zeroes you can put in front of the coin price on a game like Pegaxy.  It’s not because people don’t like the game.  It’s because so many people have played it and dumped the token that there’s very little liquidity left. Handing out rewards in your token does 2 horrible things:

1. It reduces the token price as people dump it
2. It massively increases your circulating supply, making it nearly impossible to recover the token price

For this reason, we typically recommend never giving out your native game token.  Instead, charge it and turn it for every action in your game, just like ETH, SOL, BNB, etc. do. Your next question is… what do people earn then?  That part is easy.  Have them earn stable coins like USDT or USDC.  To do this, follow what ZED RUN and BR1 have done and charge an entrance fee to play the game. For instance, in BR1 you pay $1 to spawn and you earn $0.85 per kill.  Guess who gets to keep the profit…?  You, the game!  

Tip #5 – Write Content

If you’re in it for the long haul (ie not pushing for a rug pull), then spending some time creating valuable content is a good way go.  Keep in mind that it takes about 6 months for articles to start indexing on a new website via SEO, but in the long run it can pay off in a major way. We’re a PPC ad agency, and we go through long phases of not running ads ourselves at all because our SEO content does so well.  It was a total pain writing 50+ articles for a given topic, but when you couple that with some videos and content that is valuable for the industry, it can go a long way building relationships with people that you haven’t even met yet. If you would like help with marketing your NFT project, we would love to help.  

How do I engage with you?

Just go to our Contact Us page and fill out the form.  From there it will take you to a Calendly where you and I can setup a call to speak directly.

 

 

Video Transcript:

Hi there, nice to meet you. My name is Grant James. I think I’m sporting a BYU Girl Dad shirt today. But yeah, just wanted to talk a little bit about an article that I just wrote, kind of walk you through it a little bit. It’s called Five Tips For Using NFT Ads To Increase Your NFT Game’s DAU, I don’t even know how you pronounce that, but daily active users. A little bit of background on myself. I’m the owner of Lead PPC. We’re an ad agency. We specialize primarily in franchise development, lead generation, and kind of all sorts of paper click ads, Google ads, Facebook ads, things like that for franchise development and franchises, ORs and franchisees in general. Been doing that for about 12 years. One of the industries that we’re expanding into is the NFT space, more specifically NFT gaming. I’m an MLG Halo player, love everything that has to do with online games and stuff like that.

And my partner and I have co-founded, we’re one of the largest guilds in the world, I don’t know exactly where we stack up because so many guilds have kind of fallen by the wayside with the market. But at our peak, I think we had around 5,000 active players. I don’t know exactly where it’s at right now, but we’re in about 20 different games. And we’re really focused on games that we can play as a group. So lately we’ve been playing a lot of Bynamon Fire Wars, which is a lot of fun. It’s like Dragons on the Sky. Also been doing some DarleyGo BR1 and looking at launching Mech here pretty soon, there’s a game called Fancy Birds that has a new multiplayer game called Sky Wars, we’ve been getting into. So anyway, loving all that type of stuff. So we’re going to be talking about how to increase your daily active users through advertising.

There’s not a lot of options out there in some ways, but there’s a lot, that’s kind of coming down the pipeline and we’ll kind of get into some of that as well. So one of the most important things, and you probably know this is utilizing guilds, but I think it’s important to know how guilds do what they do behind the scenes. Most of our players that we found have come from games that are hot and basically going into those Discords and saying, “hey, we have scholarships available.” So whether that’s like Axie Infinity or Pegaxy, between December of 2021 and about March, April of 2022, recently, we’ve been going into, since we’re in so many different games, we’ve been going in and just posting, “hey, we have scholarships.”

So probably most people are most interested in right now for us and this is September 14th, 2022 is Fancy Birds, just so many requests for that game, probably because their token didn’t really fall apart like a lot of tokens, it’s pretty easy to play. And I’d say we’re also getting a lot of requests for DarleyGo and a handful of other games. So what we try to do is, guilds, I think are really good at just constantly connecting with players and they understand kind of the industry in general. It’s important to have guilds that are active guilds, so I have a lot of friends that have started guilds and then when the token prices and NFT prices have kind of fallen apart, some they kind of abandoned the space. So it’s important that the people that you sell your NFTs to, are people that are going to be sticking around.

And also one thing that we’ve been having a lot of success with lately kind of behind the scenes, good to just kind of know, is that using Telegram seems to work a little better for us as a guild versus using Discord. We have a Discord channel and that’s important, but actually getting active players to play multi-player at a given period of time. Telegram works way better for us. So for instance, for Bynamon Fire Wars, I literally pay out a dollar USDT every day for up to 20 people to come and play at a specific time. And as that expands, we will help bring advertising dollars into Bynamon Fire Wars to help expand what we can do there. And then probably just have a price pool, so 40 people come, they’re earning 50 cents instead of a dollar just because I’m kind of footing the bill on that.

And there’s more of that kind of going on ev.io. For instance, they have a $10,000 Salona price pool that they pay out in [inaudible 00:04:59] to all the players based off of kills. Anyway, but leveraging guilds and having them help bring that player base is really important. Just make sure that you have a sustainable economy because if your token prices and NFT prices are all a shot, it does get really tricky because people just don’t want to play the game. Tips number two and three have to do with advertising, so if you have a Web2 enabled game, then you can do advertising on YouTube ads and Facebook ads. If you need help with that, we’ve managed over $15 million in ads on these different platforms, would love to help you out with that. Obviously everyone’s still kind of learning, there’s not a built in tried and true thing for NFT advertising, but I think we have a lot of understanding of the industry and how to design those advertisements to either sell NFTs or help bring in players.

You’ll notice like Guild of Guardians, who’s been doing some advertising on Facebook. One of the groups that we invested into pretty heavily Mech NFT, mech.com, with Trey Smith. Those guys we found just through a YouTube ad, so definitely works. And we bought like 150 of those just from seeing an ad. Looking up Dragon Master and then finding that. And I wish we could see more of that. I wish that it was more commonplace for games to advertise and not just focus on a mint and then just kind of bail. So I think that’s important. So number tip number four, fix your reward system.

So one of the things that I say here is talking about how handing out rewards in your token does two really horrible things. One, it reduces the token price as people dump it. So an inside of the swap, the morbid that gets put into the swap and the other token exchange for it, then the price of the token that’s getting dumped is going to go down, but also it really increases your circulating supply, making it nearly impossible to recover. So you have to be really careful with that, basically the way that so many games, like Axie Infinity, and Pegaxy and all these games are designed is that they’re expecting basically all these points are getting generated inside of these games, whether it’s SLP or VIS, those points are given in tokens to the players. And then they’re expecting for guilds to come back and buy all that up to go get more players. So it’s like very Ponzi ask, some things that we’ve seen that are more promising our entry fee based games. So I’m a big fan of stuff that is paid in stable coins.

So BR1, for instance, I think has pioneered a lot of that before that maybe ZED Run is probably the best model to look at. If more games would’ve followed ZED Run, instead of Axie Infinity as an industry, I think we’d be in a much better place because paying entry fees is going to really add, you’re adding to the economy instead of taking out and just like Web2, we’re used to people adding, but for some reason in Web3 everyone’s just kind of like a taker. Pay me, I’m here to flip. I’m here to make money and you don’t run deal. My personality’s totally different where we try to take some profits because you have to because of the industry, but really I want to stay there as long as I can and really help build stuff. So doing entry fee based games, so with BR1, it’s $1 per spawn, $1 per kill or 80, 85 to 90 cents per kill. So if you spawn, it’s like an arcade, you pay a dollar. Then if you kill somebody, you get like 85 cents to 90 cents per kill.

So that’s a much more sustainable model and anything that can be done in stable coins, that’s why we’re even willing to help pay for some of those things, because we believe in those types of economies, kind of a hybrid one. If you look at Fancy Birds, they have something called Bird Seed, which is really pretty clever. Basically every five days you have to pay 50 cents per bird, so we have over 500 birds. So it starts to add up a little bit, but totally down with it because what we do is we’re either paying in their token or in USDC. Then if we paid in USDC, the company takes a big chunk of that and goes and buys their token back and is maintaining that price. But its circulating people are putting money in. I’d like to see them have what their firewalls game, I’d love to have some type of entry fee stuff there eventually. But I think that they’ll get there. But not just all this just yield farming stuff, I think is either going to change or go away, or there’s going to be more different options in there.

So really having a good reward system, we won’t even get into games that are built like Axie anymore, because they just don’t work because people forget that Axie has $50 million, same with ZED Run actually ,that they’ve raised in order to help sustain economies and those types of things. Tip number five, right content, just like this. I mean obviously you found this article through SEO or through YouTube with watching this video here. So those types of things can make a difference as well. So just always be putting out content, natural content, organically, that’s well written video content, do paid advertising. And one other thing for us like with Fire Wars, for instance, I do this thing, that’s like friend Friday. So if somebody brings a friend to come play with them, then I’ll pay $1 for the person who came, plus $1 for their friend and the $1 for them referring it.

So those two people cost me $3, but that’s okay because we’re building, we’re making those things kind of work. And if a game has no players, then it’s never going to work. So if you believe in what you’re doing, be willing to pay marketing dollars until everything is kind of sustainable where people are paying and they love the game itself. But at the end of the day, it has to be a good game. If the game isn’t good, it’s just not going to work. Anyway, but if you’d some help with advertising or to kind of discuss what you guys are up to, fill out the contact us form on our site, kind of below, and maybe there’s an opportunity from a guild side, maybe from an advertising side. Not exactly sure, but yeah, love to connect. Thanks. Bye.