First Triqui’s milestone: 250,000 plays – considerations

This is the first milestone for Triqui: 250,000 plays.

I know there are portals that reach that number in a day (or less), anyway for a portal made in a few hours, I think it’s an important step.

If you want to know more about Triqui, I suggest you to read these posts:

Ramblings about Flash game portals

Play Flash games on Triqui.com

More ramblings about Flash game portals

And now it’s time to show you something about Triqui:

Ads placements

At the moment I am trying to monetize Triqui only with Adsense, so I placed one ad in the homepage and one ad in the page where you can play games.

The ads are placed in two very different areas, I made this in order to collect some data about interaction between the user and the ads.

As you can see from the picture, in the first page the ad is at the very top of the screen, while in the second one it’s in the middle of the page.

The theory is: very few people will look at the first ad because they are looking at the games, and a lot of people will look at the second one because it’s just under the game they are playing (and watching)

Let’s see some numbers:

Home page CTR: 0.12
Game page CTR: 1.31

Home page eCPM: 0.14
Game page eCPM: 2.22

Obviously the game page ad is a lot more profitable than the home one.

Some of you may argue some clicks in the game page may be caused accidentally because the ad is too close to the game.

Yes… maybe… but I don’t think this represents more than 10% of the total clicks.

Driving traffic

The only way I promoted Triqui was through this blog, and with two self-sponsored games: Jamag and Bees n’ Flowers.

According to Google analytics, this is the chart of the visits to Triqui Triqui when the games got the frontpage of an important portal (no matter which portal).

As you can see, the “portal effect” is quite strong, and if you consider an average 5 plays per user, in its best day the portal scored 7,259 visitors and more than 35,000 plays with a 2.22 eCPM.

Not that bad, if you consider there is still no reason to return to Triqui once you visited it.

Actually my plan is breaking the average 1,000 daily visitors, with some new features to be added soon.

Again, I know 1,000 visitors is nothing, but the entire portal is nothing, don’t forget there are no more than 100 php lines.

Search Engines

I did not that much to rank in search engines, but in some cases I had some nice surprises… I am the first relevant result for umbrella trick and the second one for operation darkness strike.

I am not talking about Bloons, but they drive some traffic to the site, and that’s enough at the moment.

Final ramblings

Remember… if you can make some money developing Flash games, you can make even more money hosting a Flash gaming portal. You just need to drive some traffic on it and have something that will make visitors return.

Now I am planning a rating/reviewing system to the portal, just to see if I manage to fidelize some players.

Meanwhile, I would like to hear the voice of some small portal owners.