Do Viral Games Perform Better Than Videos For Marketing?

Viral marketing has become synonymous with often funny or controversial online videos. Due to over saturation, achieving good results with commercial viral videos however is becoming more and more difficult. Viral games on the other hand are far from the saturation point, and with video games being a massively growing market, they’re doing better than ever, here’s why:

Viral games are much easier to seed successfully

Because of the many high traffic online games community sites and portals that are constantly looking for new content it’s easy to get you game featured. These website will often feature new games on the front page, providing massive amounts of traffic to your viral game and potentially getting your game played by millions worldwide. Try getting on the front page of YouTube or any of the other high profile video sharing sites and see how far you get. The sheer volume of submissions the video sharing sites get makes it virtually impossible to get anywhere near the front page, which means your video just gets lost amongst millions of others.

Viral games get consistently higher viewing figures

The ease of seeding and the fact that there is less competition means viral games typically get many times more views than videos. Millions (or even tens of millions) of worldwide plays are commonplace with viral games. Getting those sorts of numbers with viral videos is impossible for all but a handful of the very best viral videos.

You can put web links into viral games

It’s easy to insert clickable links to your business or product website into your viral game. And people do click them (usually in their thousands). Typical clickthrough rates on a viral game are over 10% (many times higher than banner ads). It’s impossible to include a clickable link in viral videos, the best you can do is include your web address within the video and hope people visit your site. The actual traffic generated this way can’t hope to compete with direct clickthroughs from a viral game.

Viral games are interactive

A good viral game engages your audience much better than any video by allowing them to not only see, but interact with your brand. This increases the impact of the advert, makes it more likely to stick in the viewers mind and makes return visits much more likely.

Viral games are much more cost effective

Given the above and the comparable production costs, viral games are generally much more cost effective than videos. You can expect your marketing message to consistently reach a much larger audience, for around the same cost.

You can easily, accurately monitor results with viral games

The success of viral videos can be very difficult to monitor accurately over multiple sites and trying to determine additional viewer information can be nearly impossible. Its easy to incorporate a viral tracking system into your viral game code in order to monitor detailed statistics about your campaign. Using either one of the free or paid tracking systems devised specifically for viral Flash or even Google Analytics, you can track exactly who is playing your viral game, what country they are from, how long they play for and how they interact with the game, such as web link clickthroughs. This is invaluable for keeping track of how well your viral game is performing. This sort of accurate data just isn’t easily available with viral videos.

Viral videos can be used to promote games but not vice versa

This may sound like a slight contradiction, but viral games can actually utilise viral video marketing to increase plays with little additional cost. We often use gameplay videos to get extra traffic to a viral game. Because it’s literally a video screen capture from the game there is very little work (and therefore cost) involved in adding this to a viral game.

Although videos are the first thing that spring to mind when you mention viral marketing, games are definitely more effective and worthy of your marketing budget.

Simon Walklate is a partner in UK based online game designer The Motion Monkey who specialise in viral game design.