Of course, we use Twitch for our goals. That’s just imba for marketing. Now we’re going to tell how we launched a promo video of ‘Dying Light 2’, which has got over 300 000 views in two weeks and nearly 1% of CTR with a cold audience.
The task is to attract an audience and add some pepper
In November 2021, gaming streams made up 82% of all Twitch broadcasts. That’s millions hours of traffic when people just play popular games and make some comments on their actions.
Hell, this is the best platform of all viable alternatives for promoting games and warming up the gamer’s community. If the person watches gaming streams, sure he or she is interested in such entertainment. So at the starting line, we had at least 80% hit on a target audience, an exceptional video ad, and two weeks for analytics.
The primary goal was to test the reaction of stream viewers on a cold ad campaign of survival horror Dying Light 2.
The feature is the most loyal community. If somebody watches a stream where a guy plays something, it should be easy to attract him or her by a brand new game. So we expected some fine results even from cold ads with no warming-ups.
The strategy: promoting games when playing games
Dying Light 2 was released on February 4th, 2022. That’s why in November, creators launched a huge marketing campaign to attract customers, especially for pre-order. Twitch launches were only a small part of it.
Two key features had to be considered:
- The first Dying Light game has sold over 5 million copies. In 2015, it had a large gaming community of fans, and we just needed to remind them that the second part would be released soon. It’s been seven years since the first Dying Light launch. And gamers have already forgotten what it is.
- Twitch audience is interested in games. But the genre of Dying Light is a specific one, not for everybody. That’s why we focused mainly on it to attract gamers who like horrors and survivals.
We decided not to limit streamers in games, to test the reliance of results on game genres. So ads were run with classical games like CS or Dota 2 as well as mainstream Genshin Impact, always popular card game Hearthstone, and about a dozen other big and small games. ‘Just chatting’ streams were also there, to check how the wide audience reacts to ads, but not just people who like games.
The only category we’ve expelled is music streams. We’re going different ways. There are too few people interested in games.
There also were no restrictions on stream viewers. Twitch has quite an interesting rating system. If a streamer has on average 11 viewers watching him, he’s already in the top-15%. And to get top-1%, he or she needs to have over 250 viewers.
So we have streamers with less than 10 fans and strong influencers with 5000+ viewers. But there’s some insight: the more is not always better.
Two weeks to figure it out. The campaign has been lasting from 6 to 19 of October 2021.
Results: we’ve stirred community and shocked some anime fans
Let’s tell how we did that. Just like we thought, Twitch is an outstanding platform for promoting games. Even simple ad launches for a cold audience grant fine results.
We started the campaign with 85 streamers. They had to show our video ad during their live broadcasts to their audiences. And there were the next results:
- 334 421 video shows, 99,8% of which were fully watched.
- 117 263 unique views.
- 3032 jumps to the game page
CTR is 0,91%. Great result for a cold campaign. For example, the average CTR of similar launches on YouTube Gaming is about 0,3%. Twitch has three times more.
And there are some results by genre. Such powerhouses of the gaming industry as CS and Dota 2 both gave us over 120 000 teaser views. It’s about 37% of the total number. That’s not weird cause lots of people stream them.
Genshin Impact gave unexpectedly good results. Just 4 streamers made over 400 clicks with only 14 video launches in 2 weeks. A pretty pleasant surprise. Hell knows why Genshin Impact worked so well, but it was lovely.
But Hearthstone was quite opposite. There were lots of streamers with an audience of at least 250 fans, over 37 000 video views, but no results. We’ve got a little more than 100 clicks, and even these were due to streamers with 3000+ audiences. Half of the streams made no clicks at all.
But the anime fans were a major disappointment. It wasn’t like we relied on them very much, but there were lots of streams by Anime Standing and Anime Studio Simulator with no results. Why? Who knows. After all, weeaboos like horrors.
On the other side, just chatting streams rolled up a top score. Talks, jokes, chatting — we had a huge amount of streamers in this category, and they’ve granted us over 40 000 ad views and about 500 unique clicks.
So we’ve got a fine campaign with relatively small budgets. There were over 300 000 shows of our video ad, a sky-high rate of full views, and a brilliant CTR. And we’ve also learned that not all games are equally useful for gaming projects promotion. All of that in 2 weeks. Cool? Cool!
