[daeken]

We had great success running Facebook ads to get Companions into the private beta list back when we were still in early development. Now we need to focus on getting paying customers. To that end, we plan to run Google ads for keywords related to buying/selling gold and powerleveling services; while we have no intention of doing these things (in fact, they're very much against our ToS), we feel that customers looking for such services will have a nicer, safer, and more rewarding experience with our site. We also plan to go to the standard gaming bloggers/press when we feel we're at the right point, hopefully within the next month or two.

[patio11]

That sort of bait&switch AdWords stuff rarely works well, unless the bait&switch is of the variety:

+ title: "Is Gold Selling A Scam?"

+ actual business: selling gold

You might consider doing media buys on outlets which refuse gold selling ads, since their ad rates are terrible (because they refuse the best way to monetize MMORPG traffic) and the audience is targeted fairly well. This is especially the case if you can get ones which are too obscure/niche to warrant attention from either the Chinese MMORPG publishers or the brand advertising teams at EA and whatnot. e.g. Curse Gaming currently shows a D3 ad placed directly by Blizzard so they'd be a poor choice. Penny Arcade also probably a poor choice. Popular MMORPG bloggers monetizing through Project Wonderful or something: probably a good choice.

(I'd try buying an ad through Project Wonderful, seeing if it works, than offering to just buy that ad slot directly and cut out the middleman. Bonus: they're probably cheap -- you could anchor it to something like "Hey I'll pay for your WoW subscription and buy you D3 when it comes out if you replace your ad block with this.")

[daeken]

Interesting. So you don't think that something like "Get help in World of Warcraft" or the like would convert well off of keywords like gold or powerleveling?

[patio11]

I believe that the conversions would be abysmal (on the order of ads for e.g. wedding venues on a search which clearly demonstrates immediate intent to consume pornography) and the ad network (Google, etc) will hate it.

[SkyMarshal]

Post it on reddit's various gaming and mmo subreddits too:

http://www.reddit.com/r/mmo

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming

Reddit ads targeting those subreddits might also be effective.

[JohnTitus]

You should consider, if you haven't already, doing some SEO work (both onpage and off) to target related keywords. It's usually cheaper and more successful (in my experience) than just buying ads, plus the affects are more long term.

Keywords such as "world of warcraft" + "help, guide, tips, quest help" would be good targets. Start on keywords with lower monthly search #s to get started.

Gl, and please post an update in the future to let us know how it goes.