so I'm a student, I made my first game (Garlictos, a small survivor roguelike for Android, Godot 4) and for the first 3 weeks it got like 4-5 new players a day from forum posts. I finally got a Google App campaign running this week and wanted to write down what actually happened, with real numbers, because when I was searching for this stuff I mostly found agency blogs.
3 weeks of 0 impressions
the campaign was "eligible" from day one and got zero impressions for about 3 weeks. the diagnosis just said it didn't run last week, very helpful.
the real problem was in conversions: the Google Play install conversion said "Misconfigured - Conversion data source is not linked". but in Data manager the Play link said "Linked". I unlinked and relinked from Play Console something like 5 times, same error every time.
what finally worked (as far as I can tell): unlink in Play Console, send the link request again, and then go to Google Ads > Data manager > Google Play and actually approve the pending request there. I think some of my earlier relinks were never approved on the Ads side. honestly I can't prove which step fixed it, but after that approval the campaign started spending the same day.
also: the "create new conversion > choose data source" list stayed empty for me the whole time. if that happens to you, don't waste hours on it like I did.
the numbers (first ~2 days of real delivery)
- impressions: 28,588
- clicks: 2,716 (9.5% CTR, the video + screenshots seem to do ok)
- installs: 133
- spend: about $46.5
- cost per install: about $0.35 (my target was ~$0.41)
- cost per click: about $0.017
countries were mostly India, Iraq, Bangladesh, Algeria, Spain, plus a long tail of ~45 others. basically Google went where installs are cheap.
the thing I misunderstood about "Target CPA"
I set a target cost per install and genuinely thought I only pay when someone installs. no. in App campaigns you pay for clicks. the target is just what the bidding algorithm aims for on average. Google product experts say this pretty clearly in the community forum, and 30+ people had the exact same confusion in that thread lol.
two more things I learned the hard way:
- the daily budget is an average. Google can spend up to 2x on a single day. once mine started, it burned through money way faster than I expected.
- monthly max is about 30.4x the daily budget. so a daily budget is really a monthly budget in disguise.
if you're broke like me, keep the daily budget small and lower the target in small steps, not one big jump. big jumps basically stop delivery.
what the players actually did
this was the painful part. from GameAnalytics progression events, day one:
| wave started | players |
|---|---|
| 1 | 51 |
| 2 | 38 |
| 3 | 23 |
| 5 | 12 |
| 10 | 3 |
| 12 | 1 |
- 67 new users opened the game, 51 started a run (~76%)
- half are gone before wave 3
- very few "fail" events, so most people don't die, they just close the app
- best run was wave 12 out of 20. nobody saw the boss.
- install count in Ads (133) is higher than new users in GameAnalytics, so some people install and never even open it. normal apparently, still hurts
so paid traffic didn't fix anything, it just made my first-minute problem very visible, very fast. that's what I'm working on next.
would I do it again?
yes, but slower. ~$0.35 per install is fine, but only if those players stay, and right now half of them leave in the first 2 minutes. fixing the start of the game is probably worth more than any ad setting.
if you want to see what they're quitting on, the game is free: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.garlictos.omer
(heads up: 2 short interstitials per run, revive ad is optional. graphics were made with AI tools, the code I wrote myself and later cleaned up with AI because it was spaghetti.)
happy to answer questions about the setup if anyone's about to try this.
Top comments (3)
the "you pay for clicks, not installs" part will save people real money, didnt know that either. also $0.35 installs from wherever is cheapest will always churn harder than your forum players. id compare the wave 3 dropoff between those two groups before judging the game itself
good point, I think you're right. my forum players were a tiny group (4-5 a day) but they went deeper on average: before ads roughly a third of runs reached wave 5, on the ad days it's closer to a quarter. ad traffic is mostly India / Iraq / Bangladesh so it should be easy to split by country in GameAnalytics, I'll do that this week. thanks for reading!
a third vs a quarter is a smaller gap than i'd expect from paid traffic tbh. curious whether the country split shows one country dragging the average down or all three about the same