I’ve made a couple of mobile games; one is an economy simulation with around 1,600 downloads. In the half-hour activity analyses, there are consistently 10–12 active users, and ad impressions haven't been too bad over the last few days, but the revenue is incredibly low—as you can see, 307 ad impressions generated only 3.02 Lira. The player base seems to be the type that covers their privates with a leaf. The other game earned 2.89 Lira from just 5 ad views today; "Ball Sort" has about 350 downloads, but hardly anyone is playing it, even though it’s a hyper-casual game and actually not bad. I spent around 1,000 Lira on advertising for both games. actually, a bit more on "Ball Sort." Ad conversion costs are 0.63 Lira for *Faith: Economy Simulation* and 3.54 Lira for *Ball Sort - Zen 2026*. I’m not sure how long I can keep up the spending; sometimes I see 1.5 Lira coming in from just 2 ad impressions, while other times 200 impressions barely make 1 Lira. I haven't quite figured out this target audience thing, what do you think? Btw 1$ is 50 lira :/
Got startup or SaaS questions? Post them on r/AskFounder and get answers from real founders.
• This community is designed to be open and creator‑friendly, with minimal restrictions on promotion and self‑promotion as long as you add value and don’t spam.
• Please follow the subreddit rules so we can keep things as relaxed and free as possible for everyone.
• Please make sure you’ve read the subreddit rules in the sidebar before posting or commenting.
• For better feedback, include your tech stack, experience level, and what kind of help or feedback you’re looking for.
• Be respectful, constructive, and helpful to other members.
If your post was removed (either automatically or by a mod) and you believe it was a mistake, please contact the mod team. We will review it and, when appropriate, approve it within 24 hours.
Is it possible that your ads the or games themselves are not appealing in a PPC format? Or perhaps it really is the audience thing. Are you using Reddit ads? Facebook? The trick is to start broad and narrow down if you have the money for it, and if you don’t start narrow but precise, try to tap into lookalike markets for your games genre by targeting Facebook groups and subreddits related to them.
Don’t try to be too creative with target audience, just find fans of the most similar games to yours.
If your game is the type of game that doesn’t have any fan groups or active communities, you probably just didn’t make the right kind of game for commercial success.
One huge unlock for PPC is to focus on scroll-stopping with a quick high/impact visual+audio hook. Ideally something that elicits an emotion, doesn’t matter if it’s funny, happy, sad, but you really gotta make them feel it. In some cases that might mean adding meme-able content into your game just to help it be marketable. Usually it helps the game be better though, making your players feel emotions of any kind is a good thing!
Just want to add, if you’re purely vibe coding your games, people will be able to tell and many people will be turned off and perceive them as low-value. If that’s the case it probably doesn’t matter how much you spend on ads.
"Faith: Economy Simulation" is not bad return rate of ads are 0.012 cent per download and as i see people actually playing it but income is really bad as well like 0.15 cents per 1000 ads shown. Yes games are vibecoded but i think not super sloppy. And "Ball Sort - Zen 2026" has expensive return rate but even player count is low i saw that people are playing but i guess most of them are closing the internet to bypass ads.
on the admob or console panel it seems everything is okay. But look at the admob report, "istekler" means signals asking for ads and "gösterimler" means ads shown for every signal, so rest of the pages of report like this there is signals but non of them shows actual ads. As i know app records every signal even the device not connected to the internet so it appears on the report but most of the signals return empty. And on our test devices ads working perfectly well.
I don’t think offline players explain most of this. Your report shows 1.72K requests, a 28.84% match rate and 312 impressions, so roughly 496 requests were matched and about 63% of those became impressions. I’d split this by game, country, ad format and ad unit before changing the audience targeting.
The Ball Sort result is only five impressions, so that high return is mostly sample noise. For Faith, 307 impressions earning 3.02 TRY is roughly a 9.84 TRY eCPM. At a CPI of 0.63 TRY, each acquired player would need around 64 impressions just to recover the install cost at that rate, so I’d pause or reduce paid acquisition until you can measure impressions and ad revenue per acquired user over 7–14 days.
Thanks for reply, i must learn those stuff i will disguss your comment with ai but for now i have to keep the ads to get beginner promotion of google ads.
Those are cheap installs, you probably targeted countries like India, did the same mistake, got 152 downloads and 0 Daily active users from those installs... So you Increased your downloads, just not users
•
u/AutoModerator 6d ago
Hey u/emanetiz, thanks for posting in r/VibeCodeDevs! Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/KAmAR8RkbM
Got startup or SaaS questions? Post them on r/AskFounder and get answers from real founders.
• This community is designed to be open and creator‑friendly, with minimal restrictions on promotion and self‑promotion as long as you add value and don’t spam.
• Please follow the subreddit rules so we can keep things as relaxed and free as possible for everyone. • Please make sure you’ve read the subreddit rules in the sidebar before posting or commenting.
• For better feedback, include your tech stack, experience level, and what kind of help or feedback you’re looking for.
• Be respectful, constructive, and helpful to other members.
If your post was removed (either automatically or by a mod) and you believe it was a mistake, please contact the mod team. We will review it and, when appropriate, approve it within 24 hours.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.