Using Admob to Advertise your iPhone App
Jul 01
Hey y'all it's Jen :)
How many of my fellow devs have super-awesome apps whose sales have totally stalled? Lemme hear it! I call it the App Store Plague. So how do we kick-start sales when there are thousands of new apps on top of us in the app store?
Here is our two-pronged strategy/experiment:
- Advertise with AdMob
- Post an update to the app
The first thing I wanted to try was advertising Popper! without posting an update, to have a "control test". I produced the following ad:
And posted $100 to my account to spend on the campaign. I bid .04 per click. I had it targeted for "all geographic locations", and 18 - 34 year old demographic. Here are my stats for one day:
and here are my sales for that day:
628 clicks for $25 and three sales?? Ouch!
I did some research and found that one improvement I coud have made was to put the price of the app (99¢) on the ad. I am going to run another test with the price next to see how it performs.
I'll keep this thread updated with my next steps --
07/17/2010 - **UPDATE**
Hey y'all - as promised, I'm following up with next steps in revitalizing sales of your awesome app (in our case - Popper!) that has fallen to Zeroville in the App Store.
When I wrote this post, a very cool fella, Matt M., creator of reMovem (awesome game - and free) reached out and offered to let my ad run on his game for a bit to see what results we could produce.
Some stats on reMovem free version:
- 6MM downloads
- 400,000 active users/week
The ad ran for these days with the following results:
Popper averages 1 - 2 sales a day. Taking that into consideration the AdMob promotion produced zero results and Matt's goodwill produced at least a dozen sales. Not only that, but my click thru rate almost tripled.
Some of the stats are a bit odd. July 10th (in blue) had way more impressions and clickthrus than July 8th but we only had one sale? Tracking this sort of thing over the course of months would obviously give us more reliable data, but thus far I can say partnering up with other devs to promote your app has (so far) proven more successful and less expensive than advertising on AdMob.
Does anyone out there have any other strategies to suggest? tks! jen :)
Very cool. I was curious as to the real world performance of AdMob advertising, not having jumped in yet. In the world of SEM if you are trying to sell something for $1, the CPC will be prohibitive and impossible to make any kind of ROI. At 0.04 CPC it makes a bit more sense, but right now you have a 0.48% conversion rate. You would need a 5.71% conversion rate (36 sales) just to break even — which is 12 times your current conversion rate. Looking forward to more results.
I’ve had a very similar experience with AdMob. The reporting doesn’t make sense to me at times…although they seem to be doing some interesting things.
I did try “US” only and had better results. If you don’t restrict the location the majority of clicks/downloads for my app were outside the US. Since we are a free app, with follow on postcards are paid for, most our users are US. (SnapShot Postcard is the app)