Promoting your App: Admob Review
Ever so humble, we thought we created quite a nice game with Prototype Defense; and the user reviews seemed to agree.
However, in our ignorance we assumed that creating a nice game would be enough to break through. While people are playing the game , 30k downloads so far, those numbers are nowhere near enough to make even $20 in advertising per month!
So after some headbanging we finally decided to pool money together and put the money where our mouth was and do some
MARKETING!
Our plan was to set out some test budgets for several advertising campaigns, measure their effectiveness, and chose the most effective to spend our big budget on.
In this post, I will detail the outcome of the small time budget for Admob, an advertising company now owned by Google.
The test budget set aside per campaign was $50. (Which, coincedentally that’s 1/4th of the entire advertising income of Prototype Defense for 2011 and 2012 up till June)
Some good tips we learned from advertising on Admob:
- Approving your ad can take some time, even using the automated process from Google Play: 1-4 business days.
If it takes longer than that, contact the helpdesk. - Do not set the ad bid for your ads higher than $0.02 in the beginning.
Even when we selected a somewhat restricted target audience (Male, 18-30, U.S.A, Android 3.0+); we reached our daily limit. - Monitor your spending and adjust the ad bid when necessary.
(Which is CPC (Cost-Per-Click) btw, not eCPM)
The following is an overview of how the money was spent during over a 5-day ad campaign:
As you can see, the overall cost of CPC went down to almost $0.01; and still the daily limit was filled.
We also almost blew our budget for a single day within half an hour when the ad first launched using the recommended bid of $0.15!
When the amount of clicks did not seem to affect install ratio in the slightest, we again raised the minimum bid for ads.
Now on to the juicy part, how many downloads did we get?
So for close to $50 in advertising, and a decent amount of impressions and clicks we got 8 (!) installations for the free version of Prototype Defense.
Join us next time for experimentation with Flurry, an advertising company which allows you to pay per installation instead of CPC or eCPM.
Hi
Very interesting article and almost exactly the same experience I have had using Admob to promote my app Brush DJ.
Looking forward to the results you get from Flurry!
Cheers
Ben
Great Review. Very useful and thanks for posting exact numbers!
And Flurry? Did that happen yet? Very curious. Thanks for posting.
Sorry for the delay, I just posted the review for Flurry:
http://codepoke.net/2012/08/22/promoting-your-app-flurry-review/
[…] the somewhat disappointing impressions left by Admob, we turned to a different promotion service called AppCircle by the company Flurry. AppCircle […]
Great review! I suggest to try the AppBrain App Promotion system: http://www.appbrain.com/info/advertise
It is based on cost per install (not click) and works especially well for free games.
Thanks, but we are primarily aiming for advertisement for a paid application.
Hello guys,
thank you for an interesting and informative article. We have had exactly the same experience, admob has been a bitter disappointment so far and did not contribute to selling our apps in any way. We have written similar analysis and linked your blog in the body of the article. If you want to take a peek, feel free at hedgecog.wordpress.com!
Cheers, hedgecog
Thanks; and good luck with the sales on Enigma Note!
Cheers,
GJ
[…] it is not working the way it should work for your benefit. Read a nice article by our colleagues at Codepoke too, they have had exactly the same […]
Did you play around with geo-targeting your ads at all? Although at first the thought of your ads showing around the world is really cool, as I have been there myself, it’s no secret that certain countries have more paying users and so the advertising rates in those countries tend to be more competitive. By setting up different adgroups pointing at different countries, you can set different bids.
For example, in the USA a 1 cent bid will get you little to no impressions but in Argentina you’ll burn through 1 cent bid in no time. So its not just about the bid, it’s about where you show your ads, and how competitive that market is, and how good those users are.
Admob unfortunately, as far as I can tell, does not give you any geo-reports for your campaigns. I’ve run campaigns with other ad networks, like mDotM, and just doing an entire world campaign, I saw that I had burned through a thousand dollars in just Ghana. Obviously something not quite right. Since then I’m very careful to pick and choose the countries I want to advertise in.
Hope this helps!
Vic
Yes, we did geo-targetting for the ads before running the campaign. We limited the ads to the U.S. and Europe.
Really nice review and detail about its earning.
well if i don’t have adsense account they approv my admob request ?