Advertising/Marketing for D&D/d20

[Osseum Adam]

One of the things that Osseum provides is the ability to cost-effectly advertise in some of the gaming industry's best marketing vehicles, such as Dragon and Dungeon magazines.

If anyone is interested in getting the best deal currently available to the general hobby market for these magazines, please feel free to drop us a line at adam@osseum.com.

Our rates are lower than any other offered in the industry. Want to verify this? Drop us a line and we will do just that for you.

This is one of the best values for the dollar!

No joke, no gimmick, just the best rate available for the hobby market in two of the best vehicles to reach your target customers!

Find out more at http://www.osseum.com

Thanks,

Adam Williams

 

[Krug]

I would think there's hardly any incentive at all for a d20 publisher to advertise outside of Dungeon or Dragon. Firstly, you need people to have the PHB to be able to play at all, and the audience that is aware or would want to play RPGs is small.

What about advertising on websites like RPGhost, Roleplayingtips.com or even En World? How has response been?

 

[Cergorach]

OGL publishers might have more reasons to publish outside Dungeon and Dragon...

 

[DPGDarrin]

Our rates are lower than any other offered in the industry. No joke, no gimmick, just the best rate available for the hobby market in two of the best vehicles to reach your target customers!

Adam Williams

Adam really ISN'T JOKING. If you look in the brand new Dungeon magazine, you'll see our ad on the inside cover on the Polyhedron side. While I'm not going to disclose how much we paid for that ad, I will say that its a fraction of what I was quoted as a WotC insider for the same ad. They're worth contacting.

 

[rpghost]

What about advertising on websites like RPGhost, Roleplayingtips.com or even En World? How has response been?

I'm bias as I own one of them and work with the other 2 But for only $195 a month RPGHost can get you a fair amount of cost effective traffic (usually 1000+ click throughs). Probably one of the best deals out there. EN World of course will also get you very good traffic - but I'll let Morrus speak for himself. John at Roleplayingtips.com sells a space in his 10,000 subscriber newsletter for only $50, now that's a hell of a deal. The only issue with online advertising is that you're reaching only a part of the market - that which has computers and hangs online at these sites. But your paying a lot less for it and it certainly does make sense to hit this market as well.

Now, I'll be honest. I've run many ads in Dragon and in Dungeon (for RPGNow.com, CyberCon, RPGShop.com with features of products in most) and have seen only moderate success. Maybe I don't have what the readers want? Being that we are online stores, we by far get more bang for our buck promoting online and using paid search engines like Overture.com ... now if you have a specific D20 product and want to get people interested, that may not be the best route as it's only search engine querries. For example, I might track 10-15 new customers a month coming from the Dragon ads, but if I spend $500 at Overture.com for a month I see 50+ new customers.

In summary, a small amount of money put toward some online advertising will get you a long way. Putting a LOT more money down for print ads will get you further but not proportionally so (at least that's my findings). Maybe Mongoose can speak up for product ads (oh and by they way I know they were paying less for the ads in Dragon then I was).

James
www.RPGHost.com
www.RPGNow.com
www.RPGShop.com
www.RPGStrategy.com
www.RPGKitchenSink.too

 

[Samothdm]

I've run many ads in Dragon and in Dungeon (for RPGNow.com, CyberCon, RPGShop.com with features of products in most) and have seen only moderate success.

For example, I might track 10-15 new customers a month coming from the Dragon ads, but if I spend $500 at Overture.com for a month I see 50+ new customers.

I'm curious as to how to determine this. Obviously, it's easy to track your clicks coming from Overture, but how to you determine if your Dragon/Dungeon ads are driving traffic to your site or not? Are you just looking at the monthly traffic that you normally get and then seeing if you get a "spike" when you advertise in Dragon? Or do you use a different URL in your Dragon ads so when someone types it in, they get redirected to rpghost but that way you know that they used the URL that you printed in Dragon magazine?

I've seen people do it both ways. The latter is much much more accurate, of course.

I asked Chris Pramas the same thing about the ad that he ran for Green Ronin in PC Gamer - he said that he wanted to see if the ad was "successful", but I never heard back from him as to how he was going to measure the success. Without a successful measurement in place before you place an ad, it's not fair to hold a publication to a standard that's not clearly defined.

 

[rpghost]

I'm curious as to how to determine this.

The most accurate way is to use a seperate url, but that can be a pain for the reader so we didn't want to do that as it would detract from our nice domain names.

If I advertise in a magazine, I don't see any real increase in site traffic at all. If I were to turn off my Overture.com links, I'd see my traffic drop in half. But that's really only part of the picture.

What we do is ask customers as they sign up for an account where they heard from us. The majority of people answer this question and answer it truefully. I was only comparing those people who have signed up as a customer and answered the question - not just click throughs we paid for. If I were to count clicks from search engines it would be 200+ new users a day. I'm only concerned with those that generate sales or at least enough interest that someone would fill out the new customer form.

I even do reports on customers that actually make purchases and repeat business, and for the most part the numbers are simular (though EnWorld customers skew my results as this is such a popular site that links to us for fulfillment).

So, it's not 100% accurate, sure. But I'd bet I'm 80-90% accurate at least.

James

 

[Samothdm]

What we do is ask customers as they sign up for an account where they heard from us. The majority of people answer this question and answer it truefully.

Without using a separate URL, this is probably a good way to go about it.

And, you're correct in that it won't be 100% accurate. Some people just don't pay attention to this kind of stuff. For example, I work on some pieces of business that don't advertise on television. We do radio, outdoor, magazines, newspaper, online, whatever. We'll do a focus group or survey and ask people, "Where did you see our advertisement?" and tons of people will respond, "On TV."

So, as long as you know to take your numbers with a grain of salt, that's good.

Also, as an advertiser, I would point out that while you may not see a direct correlation between running a print ad in Dragon magazine and increased traffic (or increased customer sign-ups), I would argue that an ad in Dragon (and Dungeon) gives your company a "halo effect" that you wouldn't have if you didn't run the ad. In other words, those ads give rpghost.com a sense of legitimacy that it may not otherwise have.

We see that all the time in the type of work that I do. We'll run TV ads in particular programs not because we think that an ad in that program will directly result in a sale, but because we want an association with that program's audience. We want them to associate our brand with their favorite show. Over time, that association will pay off. It may take awhile, and none of those people would probably ever say, "I saw your ad on 'E.R.' and decided to buy it." It's more ambiguous than that.

**sigh** Such is the life of an ad-man. Trying to convince clients to spend money on something that can't directly be tracked.

 

[rpghost]

I would argue that an ad in Dragon (and Dungeon) gives your company a "halo effect" that you wouldn't have if you didn't run the ad. In other words, those ads give rpghost.com a sense of legitimacy that it may not otherwise have.

Did it work? Well I wouldn't have spent so much money on the ads if I didn't believe (or hope) that this would be the fact. In particular I think RPGNow.com does/gets most of its business online, but we ran many ads for it because we want the trust of vendors and customers both.

Hard to really say if it worked - I mean unless some people here actually speak up about what they thought or how they feel, how can we actually poll for this info?

James
P.S. We'll be at GenCon primarly for promotion purposes as well. I doubt we'll even earn enough to pay for the booth. But it fails under the same category. Booth #554 if you have time stop by!

 

[Krug]

Actually, Rpghost, I didn't even notice your ad was in Dragon until you mentioned it and I found it. I think a new ad is in order; mayhap even advertising some of the great products you have. A suggestion to those advertising in RPG magazines; think outside the box. I always see standard fantasy fare in Dragon ads, and it just flies past without registering. You'll notice a lot of Computer Game ads try to avoid using screen captures in their advertisments, or make them peripheral to the main idea of the ad. I think more RPG companies should try this approach.