Cost per wishlist: how to measure it and what is normal
2 min read
By Eduardo Orellana ·
Cost per wishlist is ad spend divided by the wishlists the ads added, measured as the rise in daily wishlists over your usual baseline while the ads run, read from Steamworks. Developers commonly report anything from well under a dollar to several dollars a wishlist, depending on genre, platform, creative and country. Whether a figure is good depends on what a wishlist is worth to you: roughly your price times your conversion rate, minus Steam's share.
A wishlist has a price, and a value
Paying two dollars for a wishlist is fine if it turns into a sale often enough, and wasteful if it rarely does. So measure both sides.
Measuring it
- Note your average daily wishlists for two weeks before the ads.
- Run the ads with nothing else changing.
- Subtract the baseline from daily wishlists during the ads.
- Divide the spend by the extra wishlists.
Platform-reported conversions are estimates; Steamworks is the count that matters.
What a wishlist is worth
Price, times the share of wishlists that eventually buy, times what you keep after Steam's share and taxes. See wishlist conversion rate.
What moves it
The creative's first seconds, the capsule and Steam page that the ad lands on, targeting by genre and comparable games, and the countries you buy in.
Where Flockbay fits
Flockbay shows the ad platforms' own numbers beside your Steam numbers, with no claim of cause, and drafts campaigns on your own ad accounts, which you launch. Free in beta until 1 December 2026.