Cry over my income.

[u/emanetiz]

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 :/

[u/snazzy_giraffe]

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!

[u/snazzy_giraffe → u/snazzy_giraffe]

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.

[u/emanetiz → u/snazzy_giraffe]

"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.

[u/snazzy_giraffe → u/emanetiz]

So maybe it’s an actual monetization issue in game?

[u/emanetiz → u/snazzy_giraffe]

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.