18 - Paid Advertisment

Especially if you don’t want to sell only locally, you won’t be able to avoid paid advertising. Of course, organic advertising (spread through word of mouth and enthusiasm) is better in almost every way, but it will never reach the same audience. Why do I say “in almost every way”? Organic advertising takes an enormous amount of time. Paid advertising is also very inexpensive, especially when it points to a great product — that’s when it becomes truly efficient.

It’s also important to keep the right target group in mind. For example, you can place ads on BoardGameGeek, the largest platform for board games, or in other specialized forums. Or on various social media platforms.

For board games on Kickstarter, Facebook advertising actually seems to be the most efficient. At least, that’s what you read in board game design groups and blogs. The advantage here is mainly that you can define very precisely which target groups will see your ads. Apparently, you can also run very effective A/B tests. That means: I can show one version of the ad with slightly different wording to 100 people, and another version to a different group of 100 people. Based on their reactions, I can see which wording works better. This allows you to optimize your posts.

However, I’ve often read that ads on BoardGameGeek tend to work better for more complex games, and that otherwise the advertising there is relatively expensive.

You should be especially careful when it comes to pricing. It’s a tricky topic. Depending on the type of ad, you usually pay differently. Often it’s based on impressions — meaning how many people saw the ad. But just because an ad was shown 1,000 times doesn’t mean everyone is interested, or that they click for more information, or that everyone who clicks signs up for the newsletter, or that everyone who gets that far is actually willing to buy the game.

Photo by Andre Benz on Unsplash

So if I pay €1.70 per click on my ad, but only every tenth click leads to a purchase, that means I paid €17 in advertising for that customer. If my profit margin is €18, that customer is still a profit! Naturally, larger and more expensive games give you more room to work with. And more customers might allow me to produce a larger print run, which makes manufacturing cheaper.

There are also several positive effects of advertising that are difficult or even impossible to measure. Clicks that lead to your site bring you traffic, and you appear more often to other potential customers. People might share information about your game even if they don’t buy it themselves. And you can find fans who bring life to your pages or help you in other ways. It also generally helps when people have already seen or heard about a product before. Maybe I don’t click the first time I see an ad, but the next time I read something about the game, I might. Sure, there may be people who get annoyed by ads and therefore refuse to buy the product — but who knows whether they would have ever seen it, and then bought it, without the ad? So this point probably doesn’t weigh too heavily. As I said, these effects are very hard to measure, but they are mostly very positive side effects of advertising.

I haven’t run any paid ads for my game yet. I’ll report more once I have. These are primarily things I’ve found online or learned in marketing seminars and during my psychology studies. I’m sure some of you can add more precise insights. I — and certainly other readers — would really appreciate your comments!

Update 1: In the meantime, I have run ads, but I wasn’t able to track them properly. That makes it hard for me to judge how effective they were. There are trackers you need to install on the page your ad links to. Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough time to look into this properly.
Update 2: I unfortunately can’t say how effective Facebook advertising will still be in 2026. I know (though only from my personal circle) that hardly any of my friends use Facebook anymore since so many AI-generated posts started appearing there.