A quick look at Google search trends and HTML5 games

I threw some money (£100 courtesy of a Google voucher) at trying to promote my mobile HTML5 games portal (m.spacemonsters.co.uk) earlier today.

After initially falling foul of Google’s stance on over-capitalisation of words I finally found a good looking advert with all the right words.
I punched in a load of keywords that I figured mobile users would punch in to Google in their attempts to find free games and saved the campaign.

Within minutes the ads were up and running ( on mobile devices only ).

Within an hour I had some figures to play with.

In the space of 1 hour I had accumulated around 72 clicks from 1,500 impressions for a cost of around £3.50. A quick glance across to AdSense and I’ve made a fantastic 57p from adverts clicked in those games. ( This time next year, Rodney … )

So what were these people keying in to Google for my adverts to appear ?

• “Online free games”
• “Free mobile games”
• “Free games play”
• “Free games”
• “Mobile games”

and a couple more specific ones

• “Free driving games”
• “Free shooting games”

Interestingly not a single click was recorded for any of the key phrases I had prefixed with HTML5. In fact there wasn’t a single click for anything that included the word Arcade either. This surprised me a little.

So I left it all for a bit and checked again. ( AdWords isn’t realtime in that sense. )
A couple of hours later and I’d had 16,500 impressions and twice as many clicks. Yes, the CTR was falling :)

Another more detailed look at the stats and I could see a familiar pattern emerging. People were certainly typing in the words “Free”, “Mobile” and “Online” to find their games.

So this got me thinking a bit. If the public at large are happy to be specific about the words Mobile and Online, for example, is there a chance that phrases like Browser or HTML5 could ever creep in to their conscience. It seems unlikely but I shall certainly be watching this space with interest !