TA1

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School

University of Washington *

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Marketing

Date

Feb 20, 2024

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Uploaded by MasterSnowBoar37

1 Team Assignment 1 A spreadsheet containing the internet marketing campaign data for Blendo Games is available as TA1.xlsx. You would need that for solving this assignment. Blendo Games, is a boutique gaming company based out of Los Angeles, California. The company creates and sells independent video games for use on PC, Mac, Linux, and Xbox360. All games are designed and programmed by the company’s creator, Brendon Chung, and have unique and humorous qualities. The company was created in 2009, starting with the popular strategy / adventure game, Flotilla. The game garnered Blendo Games with an honorable mention in the 2011 Independent Games Festival and was named one of the “20 Best 20 Indie Games” by EDGE Magazine. After the success of Flotilla, Blendo Games went on to create a small number of other adventures, strategy and educational games. The company’s main website is http://blendogames.com/ and enables customers to purchase games directly from the site and provides links to related blogs, game updates, latest news and social media. Blendo Games operates in the Independent video game niche space typically referred to as “indie games”. These games are created by individual developers or small teams without the financial support of a video game publisher. The genre has become increasingly popular due to new improved online methods of distribution and development tools making development increasingly economical. Because the concepts are not restrained by budget limitations, the team size and developer control enhance the individual involvement. This creates a culture of innovation, creativity and artistic experimentation among the developers in this space. The indie game market started and remained focused around PC game platforms. The marketplace saw shareware distribution in the 90’s but larger game houses and increasing user expectations cause the indie gaming market space to decline. Recently, with online distribution and access to platforms like Xbox Live, and Steam, the indie game marketplace has seen resurgence. The indie market is also shifting heavily to online marketing which has made developers products much more profitable than though retail marketing. Online distribution portals provide one avenue to sell these products but limit the developer profits to about 17% of selling price, whereas direct digital distribution pushes revenue to about 85% of retail pricing. The competition in the market is highly segmented as development costs are very low and there are very few barriers to entry. Blendo Games currently has a website in which all of its video games can be purchased. The website describes in a clear and simple way what each game is about and has accessible links for the corresponding demos. The website is very user friendly making easy to the consumer to buy the product. Blendo Games also sells its products on Steam (store.steampowered.com), a website that sells desktop games. Specialized gaming Blogs are used to promote specific games. In addition, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and RSS Feed are leveraged as part of Blendo’s current marketing initiatives. The website has good visibility when words that are part of Blendo’s games names are searched specifically. This means that there is a very good connection between the word and the company’s website since the name of the games could potentially mean different things. However, when customers search using generic words such as “video games,” the website does not appear. To increase its revenue, in 2010, Blendo Games adopted Pay per click advertising across a number of publishers, Google, MSN, Overture, and Yahoo. Separate campaigns were run across these publishers and these campaigns did increase the revenue of Blendo Games. At this time, the management of Blendo Games has hired you to optimize its internet marketing campaigns. They have provided you their detailed PPC report and want you to help them with the following questions:

2 1. Which publisher is providing the highest Return on Advertising (ROA) Dollar? 2. Does Google require an improvement on search side copy? Why/Why Not? 3. Does Yahoo require an improvement on website side copy? Why/Why Not? 4. The company intends to increase funding for Yahoo but decrease funding for MSN because Yahoo has a decent CTR but MSN has the lowest CTR among all publishers. Would you support this decision? Why/Why not? 5. The company expects that the exact match and phrase match keywords would provide higher ROA compared to broad match keywords. While updating their strategy they are thinking about bidding on only exact and phrase match keywords. Would you support this decision? Why/Why Not? 6. The company feels that global audience (targeted through Google ‐Global, MSN Global and Yahoo ‐ Global) does not purchase the products from it and wishes to know if it is worthwhile to still invest in advertising to global audience. What do you recommend? 7. Would the search side strategies that the company should employ be different for US audience and Global audience? Please explain what the strategies should be. 8. What strategies would you suggest for improving performance for each of the publishers? Please submit a WORD file with your answers and analyses, and python code (or separately your .ipynb files).

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