One Ad, Three Audiences · Atlas of Doors dev journal

The story so far: five rounds, one champion, a wearing ad

Since late June we have run five small Reddit campaigns, each a controlled test with its own tracking tags, judged by our own telemetry rather than the ad platform's click counts. A click is cheap. What we count is whether the person behind it reaches the game and plays.

Round	Question	Spend	Impressions	Clicks	CTR	Answer
R3	Which of 10 ad concepts sells?	$350.00	677,601	5,187	0.77%	Three hooks stood out: honest, daily, instant
R4	Which wording of each hook?	$350.00	599,463	4,473	0.75%	The pattern that names what you are freed to do
R5	Let the platform pick among the 3 winners	$336.00	616,196*	4,594*	0.75%*	The honest ad took 69% of the budget on merit

*R5 figures read one day before its window closes. R1 and R2 were early video and single-image probes on other channels; they mostly taught us to switch to static images on Reddit.

Three facts drive Round 6

The champion holds, but the artwork is wearing out. The honest ad's click-through fell 14% between its second and third round in front of overlapping audiences. Its two sibling winners fell 20% and 26%. Ads age like produce.
We have reached 1.09 million unique redditors for about $1,116 all-time. Yet round 5 still found an audience that was roughly 97% new to us, because keyword delivery quietly drifted far beyond our hand-picked communities, into general subreddits. It converted surprisingly well.
We could never attribute quality to an audience. Our tags separate ad from ad, not audience from audience. When 32% of round 5 arrivals bounced without a single tap (up from 24% in round 4), we could suspect the broader delivery mix, but not prove it. Round 6 fixes exactly this.

The ad: one creative, frozen

Every audience sees the exact same ad, byte for byte: the reigning champion from rounds 4 and 5. Changing one variable per round is the entire method. This round the variable is the audience, so the creative is frozen even though we know it is aging.

The honest ad: real game art with the headline text baked in — The champion creative, built from real in-game art. No AI portrait slop: our target subreddits ban it, and so do we.

Post headline

“No energy bars. No lives to refill. Play as much as you want, free.”

Why this one earned the slot

Beat its own control by 18 points of activation in round 4 (p < 0.001).
In round 5 the platform's budget optimizer, free to spend anywhere, gave it 69% of the money.
It buys an engaged player (someone who lands and actually starts interacting) for about $0.11. A player who comes back on another day costs about $1.81.
The copy pattern that keeps winning: name what the player is freed to do, right now. Not features, not lore.

And one retirement

The daily-challenge creative is out of rotation. By round 5 its click-through had sagged to 0.61% and only a third of its arrivals reached the path picker. The daily-run concept is fine; that particular artwork is spent.

The three audiences

One campaign, three ad groups, equal budgets of $16 per day each, and platform-level budget optimization switched off so the money cannot pool. Each audience carries its own tracking tag, so for the first time our dashboard will split engaged share, inert share, and cost per engaged player by audience.

r6-core control

The exact audience of rounds 3 to 5: our hand-picked genre communities plus intent keywords. Estimated reach 21.6 to 27 million.

Why it runs: it is the baseline, and a clean read on audience exhaustion. Same ad, same audience as round 5: any decline is pool depletion, measured, not guessed.

18 communities

r/slaythespirer/balatror/roguelikesr/roguelitesr/MonsterTrainr/inscryptionr/cobaltcorer/Peglinr/DiceyDungeonsr/BackpackHeror/LuckBeALandlordr/Stacklandsr/incremental_gamesr/IndieGamingr/indiegamesr/playmygamer/freegamesr/WebGames

23 keywords

roguelike deckbuilderdeck builderdeckbuilderslay the spirebalatromonster traininscryptioncard battlercard roguelikeindie deckbuilderdungeon crawler cardsfree to play card gamedeck synergyrelic synergyroguelikerogueliterun basedone more rundaily runascension levelpush your luckbrowser gameinstant play

r6-genre fresh pool

Communities only, no keywords. Thirteen subreddits we have never once targeted: run-based games adjacent to ours, plus mobile players who match how our game is actually played. Estimated reach 3.1 to 3.9 million.

Why it runs: if the core pool is tiring, the cheapest fix is a neighboring pool with the same taste. This measures whether adjacent-genre players activate like our core did when it was fresh. (Reddit rejected two more candidates, r/Wildfrost and r/GriftlandsGame, at validation.)

13 communities

r/AcrossTheObeliskr/DawncasterRPGr/VampireSurvivorsr/HadesTheGamer/deadcellsr/riskofrainr/darkestdungeonr/ftlgamer/IntoTheBreachr/CultOfTheLambr/tinyroguesr/AndroidGamingr/iosgaming

r6-broad wildcard

Keywords only, no community list at all. The same 23 keywords as the control, but delivery is free to roam all of Reddit. Estimated reach 19.4 to 24.3 million.

Why it runs: round 5 already leaked into general subreddits by accident, and the click-through there matched our genre communities. This makes the accident deliberate and finally attaches a quality reading to it. If broad delivery matches the control on cost per engaged player, our audience ceiling is far higher than we modeled. If it floods us with bounces, we will see that too, on its own tag.

23 keywords (same list as the control; no communities)

Shared setup, identical across the three: Traffic objective, automatic placements, lowest-cost bidding, comments left on, worldwide. Links carry utm_campaign=r6-audiences with utm_content naming the audience.

What we want to achieve

1 · Attribute quality to an audience

Engaged share, inert share, runs per player, and cost per engaged player, split three ways. This is the measurement we have never had, and it decides where round 7's budget goes.

2 · Measure pool depletion honestly

The control cluster repeats round 5 exactly, so its decline (or refusal to decline) puts a number on how burned our core audience really is, instead of a vibe.

3 · Find the home for the refreshed creative

New executions of the winning hook are being prepared from newly shipped art while this runs. Round 7 puts the fresh artwork on whichever audience wins round 6.

4 · Keep the live experiment fed

Inside the game, an A/B test on the title screen's hook line is running right now. It needs about 890 sessions per arm to conclude. Campaign traffic gets it there in days; organic alone would take three weeks.

The constraint we keep on purpose

No ad pixel, ever. The platform would happily optimize delivery toward people who reach the game, but that requires third-party tracking on our domain, a consent banner, and a data-sharing relationship we do not want with anyone. Measurement stays first party: tagged links and our own anonymous telemetry. It costs us some efficiency. We consider it well spent.

Predictions, in writing, before launch

A test you cannot lose is not a test. Here is what we expect, so that next week's readout can grade us in public.

The control declines. Same ad, same audience, third serving: we expect its cost per engaged player to come in worse than round 5's $0.11, with click-through continuing the measured 10 to 15% per-round decay. depletion is real

The fresh genre pool posts the best engagement rate. Highest engaged share and the lowest inert share of the three, resembling our core audience back when it was new. Its risk is volume: 3 to 4 million people may be too few for cheap delivery at $16 a day. fresh beats familiar

Broad buys the cheapest clicks and the most bounces. Lowest cost per click, highest inert share. The open question we refuse to predict confidently: whether its cost per engaged player still lands within striking distance of the control. If it does, our addressable pool is not 1.6 million people, it is an order of magnitude larger. the wildcard

Retention will not care which audience we buy. Next-day return lands between 3 and 4% and day-7 near 1% for all three. Five rounds have taught us that ads move the top of the funnel enormously and the bottom not at all. Retention is won inside the game, and that work happens in parallel, not in the ad manager. not purchasable

The first three days will look worse than the truth. Fresh ad groups spend their opening days in the platform's learning phase. We measured this in round 4: one identical ad read 20% activation in its first days and 53% after settling. We will judge settled days only, and so should you when you read the readout. method note

The scoreboard we will publish

Next journal entry, after July 31: this table, filled in, plus a grade on each prediction above.

The readout is published. The table below is filled in, and all five predictions are graded, over here: The Audience That Clicked Most, Played Least. Two of the five were wrong, and one of the wrong ones turned out to be the finding of the round.

Audience	Landings	Engaged %	Inert %	$ / engaged player	Next-day return	Verdict
r6-core	—	—	—	—	—	pending
r6-genre	—	—	—	—	—	pending
r6-broad	—	—	—	—	—	pending

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