BuzzerBeater Forums

Ha, you may be right! This game has so much more potential than HT, and he's going to be pretty busy working with it.

But, if a guy's smart enough to design this one, I think he's probably got a good bead on the HT match engine, as well. I figure he deserves a shot.

Let me ask: What do you think we could do to help grow the US userbase? I'd love to see the US become the biggest nation in BB, but that means we need to find places other than Hattrick to advertise.

I'm hardly a marketing expert, but my wife has a therapy/counseling practice and I created a website for her. We do the usual pay-per-click advertising on Yahoo! and Google (averages about $0.70 per click which is probably more than BB can spend on acquiring users).

However, she gets about 1/3 of her website traffic from posting on Craig's List (completely free, just takes 5-10 minutes everyday). Was wondering if we had a campaign of people positing under the gaming discussion boards http://sandiego.craigslist.org/forums/?forumID=85 or maybe elsewhere -- if that would be effective.

Maybe if BuzzerBeater would provide some posting templates, some of the US users would be willing to post them on Craig's List. Not sure if BB uses Google-Analytics, but maybe you could feedback the number of clicks we're getting from Craig's List to see if it effective.


Steve

How about ads on CBS Sportsline, ESPN.com, TNT.com?

I wonder if your better target market is sports fans or more likely online gamers. Are you better off targeting advertising on Sports sites and hoping to capture the gaming percentage from those sites or the converse.

Tracking is key...one thing I might suggest, is that when a player sign up, you ask or track where they heard about BuzzerBeater from. Then, in the future, you can look at your user base and see where the most effective sources of long-terms users is.

Steve

The reason BB hasn't advertised much outside of HT is because the retention rate makes it not worth it at the moment. People may sign up, but very few would actually play. The rate for people signing up via HT is much higher.

The reason BB hasn't advertised much outside of HT is because the retention rate makes it not worth it at the moment. People may sign up, but very few would actually play. The rate for people signing up via HT is much higher.

Agreed, that's why I wasn't suggesting a pay-per-click or paid advertisement. I think the only way it would make sense is on free places (ie. Craig's list etc.). And then, it might not be worth the effort.


Steve

BB does use Google Analytics, you can see it tracking in the bottom left corner as pages load.

I think if I had to pick between online gamers and sports fans, I'd go with online gamers, as the retention rate is probably much higher. I didn't know anything about soccer when I signed up for HT, I just thought it would be cool. I don't think people generally need to know anything about basketball to sign up for BB (I don't really).

early on we tried advertising on other online games... and we found that although we got some traffic it ending up costing us too much per RETAINED user to matter. It is exactly true that HT users are being retained at a much higher rate than normal users. CBS sportsline and the like are INCREDIBLY expensive... like 20x more expensive than we get for our advertising.

marketing is definitely important and we need to work on it to grow the US base in particular. Trust us we'd really like more US users, both in that we'd love to see the US do well.. and also that US users are more valuable that users from less wealthy nations.

and also that US users are more valuable that users from less wealthy nations.

I presume this is on the business side of things, correct?

A mentoring program or longer "newbie guide" might help with the retention. Obviously if people sign up they're interested, but the interest may wane with confusion. The best-run companies are aware that ensuring you keep the people who already use your product is vital to successful growth. It looks like the USA userbase has dropped by about 2.5% since last weekend?

I'm sure - and I'm sure you're aware - that there's better retention with HT users because the games are similar in a number of areas... most particularly that HT users understand this is a long-term commitment and realize immediately that you don't blow all your money on new players or a stadium upgrade. I'd think that getting newbies into a mentoring program asap would be a good first step.

Also, how's your ranking in search engines and have you done an SEO? "Buzzerbeater" comes up #1 in google, but people already have to know the exact name of the game (and it ain't "buzzer beater"). I only did a quick check, but couldn't find BB listed in the first few pages when searching "basketball simulation." I did find this link http://www.google.com/Top/Sports/Fantasy/Basketball/Simul... which would allow you to add BB into a nice area on the google search... and appears to be free. In fact I almost registered you myself, but it's really not my ball game (so to speak).

Oh, and I'd definitely point out in your site description that you can "watch the results of your management decisions with our live play-by-play match viewer." -- or something like that. Point out what sets your game apart from the rest!

Oops, back to work for me.

:-)

Edited by WTDawg (11/8/2007 10:22:36 PM CET)

Last edited by WTDawg at 11/8/2007 10:22:36 PM

(Country: Active users)
1. Italy: 2,886
2. Spain: 2,508
3. Argentina: 1,456
4. Chile: 1,382
5. France: 1,140
6. Brazil: 965
7. Portugal: 834
8. Turkey: 773
9. Greece: 720
10. USA: 711
11. Germany: 670
12. Israel: 641

Update:
1. Spain: 2,653
2. Italy: 2,459
3. France: 1,067
4. Argentina: 1,002
5. Chile: 934
6. Portugal: 647
7. USA: 600
8. Brazil: 590
9. Greece: 560
10. Germany: 498
11. Turkey: 438
12. China: 428
13. Belgium: 421
14. Israel: 413
15. Slovenia: 391
16. Uruguay: 333
17. Poland: 310

(all other countries have less than 300 active users)

We lost like 15% of our base and went up 3 spots!

Anyway, what about sports blogs, like Deadspin.com? I'm a faithful reader there and there's a big base of sports nuts that consistently visit it throughout the day (so I'd think they'd have to some time to kill each day here), and I can't imagine it costs too much to advertise on a blog, but what do I know. Might be worth a look.