Monkey Island fanbase data (from Facebook)

I use Facebook ads a lot and when you use it you can choose an audience to send the ad to and you can decide things like location, gender, age, interests and you can include and exclude interests too.

It let’s you get a good idea about where audiences are, how many people, etc. because it shows you the number of people in the audience every time you change an option.

So I typed in Monkey Island to see what options are available, and these were some of the relevant ones (the number is the number of people in the audience):

Monkey Island series - 516,440
Secret of Monkey Island - 32,420
Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge - 34,990
Curse of Monkey Island - 81,010

To give you an idea, this is what it looks like when you’re doing it, when you hover over an option, you see how many people have it as an interest on the right (so I’m hovering over CofMI there)…

They also had “Ron Gilbert” and “Tim Schafer” as suggested interests you could select.

I went with “Monkey Island series” as the interest and then put in different regions to check how it breaks down per region (with age and gender on the broadest settings):

Asia - 200,000
Europe - 170,000
North America - 120,000
South America - 38,000
Africa - 25,000
Oceania - 7,700

With Asia, I’m not sure which countries in particular are providing the numbers, maybe it’s because even if there are only 1,000 in each country, there are so many countries that it adds up to a big number (if anyone is interested I could go through and see if there is any particular country that is making up the bulk of that).

I broke Europe down further into countries (you can do it for very specific locations, towns, etc. but I kept it to countries), and these ones had the biggest numbers:

Italy - 52,000
Germany - 47,000
Spain - 18,000
UK - 15,000
France - 5,500

Also I did it for male and female (all locations):
Male - 400,000
Female - 130,000

And this is by age groups (all locations):
13-18 - 19,000
19-25 - 110,000
26-30 - 110,000
31-36 - 120,000
37-42 - 79,000
43-50 - 47,000
51-65+ - 37,000

When you run an ad, you can choose to “exclude” interests as well… there is no “Thimbleweed Park” interest there yet, but if you own the page you can choose to exclude people who already like the Thimbleweed Park page (i.e. to reach people who do not already know about it).

Anyway, hope some of that was interesting! If you want to know any other data like that from Facebook, I’ll see if I can get it.

**(Sometimes the breakdowns have some overlap in the figures, eg. if someone lives in the US, but is originally from Europe, they may be counted twice in both Europe and US, and if someone hasn’t put a gender, they may get counted twice as both, etc.
Also bear in mind that this is just people on Facebook who have shown interest in these things, so it’s not the entire audience.)

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This is very cool Maybe a TWP ad toward these people would make them buy the game!

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They already did a Facebook ad campaign. Here is the result.

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Thank you. I missed that discussion. Do FB give info about clicks that go to buy the game?

Interesting data, thanks for sharing! I have never studied the adventure game fan audience on Facebook. :slight_smile:

I created a few Facebook campaigns in the past but just for a little project of mine, not for serious business. Beside its main purpose, FB ads is a wonderful tool to do market research.

Thimbleweed Park is not very popular (yet) and I assume that it’s a bit too early to expect it appear on Facebook ads as a topic, but it’s just a matter of time and I would be interested in knowing of other similar researches about the game, if you ever will decide to do them.

Color me interested for anything about data, statistics, web analysis, market research, user habits, and other related topics. :slight_smile:

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Usually you have to use additional analysis tools to understand how many people clicking FB ads go buy something on an external website.

I take it for granted that Terrible Toybox™®℠©Ⓟ used such tools to calculate their real conversion rate, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to conclude that “only made our money back”.

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Though if you do use those tools, you can also very quickly see if it’s working or not… eg. after only spending $50 - $100 you can tell how good your conversion rate and ROI is… if you see you’re only breaking even from that (or losing money), then you can either stop the ad or tweak the ad and audience until you get better conversion and then continue.

I imagine that they spent the Facebook ad money all in one go to coincide with the publicity campaign… which is a good idea if you have a large budget, but if you don’t have a large budget then you may just waste a ton of money on an under-performing ad.

With Facebook ads you normally need to spend small amounts first on different ads in order to test and establish what the best ad and audiences are and keep tweaking until you have a really well performing ad, then spend more money on it.
For something like adventure games where it looks like the market is spread about, it may even be good to get pretty specific and do an ad just to Italians for example (and send one ad in English to Italians who speak English and then one in Italian excluding those who speak English, etc.).

Also if it’s to Monkey Island fans you’d probably need to make the ad pretty clear that it’s “From the creator of Monkey Island!!” as the main thing, so that it ties into Monkey Island’s brand recognition. Similarly if it’s an ad to DOTT fans, it probably needs to mention “if you loved DOTT, you’ll love TWP!!”, etc.

To see if they actually purchased for sure you need to have a bit of code installed on the site they are buying from… that’s generally pretty hard to do unless it’s your own site, so you have to go off other metrics. For example you can do a “link” ad (sending them to the Steam page or wherever) where it will tell you how many people clicked the link to go to the site and it will tell you how much you’re paying “per click”.

You can also just do an image or a video ad where it will tell you how many people saw an image/video and liked it, shared, it, etc… obviously it’s harder to see if that’s helping sales, that would be more of a week-to-week thing where you test a different one and compare weekly sales figures to see if it’s having an effect.
There are a bunch of other types too, I don’t know what kind of ad TWP ran.

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Yes, tweaking the campaign on a small budget and investing more money only if the results are acceptable is the most savvy approach, but in this specific case (TWP FB campaign) should we exclude that reaching the break even was the result obtained after they tweaked target audiences and ads and that this result, while not very positive, was considered acceptable anyway because there were additional goals other than making an immediate profit?

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Maybe (I agree it can be acceptable because at least you’re not losing money and you increase the buyers/exposure and then possible word of mouth), but it doesn’t sound like it from what Ron said… “We spent $10K on a Facebook ad campaign, and only made our money back. It was not worth it.”

It seems like only making the money back was not acceptable and if they had known it would only break even before they did it, then they wouldn’t have done it… which suggests they only knew it broke even after they spent the $10K.
Though I don’t know what scenario would lead to not knowing the conversion rate during the campaign, only after, because you get all the data in real time…

You are right, I thought that they could have established additional secondary KPIs, like “How may people put the game in their Steam wishlist” or positive repercussions for the brand but from Ron’s words it doesn’t sounds like it.