AdMob: Our Experience
March 18, 2009
I decided to run a short AdMob campaign to promote an iPhone app I wrote for my sister, called Are You Compatible?. Link below, if you want to see what app I’m talking about. In short, it is an app that lets you enter in two people’s astrological signs, then gives you a rating of the relationship compatibility for those two signs. It sells for $.99.
To start, I funded my account with $50. While setting up the ad, I decided to target US traffic only. The minimum bid for this target was $0.20, which threw me a bit, but I figured it was worth it with this kind of targeting — not just US eyes, but only iPhone users who are also app users. Hard to beat that, right?
I created the ad, set it, and went away. A short bit later, I got an email saying the ad was approved and was up and running. I jumped in to my AdMob account to see how things were going.
All funds depleted. After 30 minutes.
Whoah.
For my money, I got 200 clicks, for only 30,000+ impressions. That’s an incredibly high CTR, but again it is highly targeted, so I let it slide.
Next day, I check my stats. How much did it affect sales? NOT AT ALL. Zero. Nada. Did nothing for me. $50 out the door.
I don’t want to judge AdMob too harshly based on one $50 run of ads, so I just re-funded the account with another $50, this time I set it to target globally, and set the minimum bid at $0.03. We’ll see what happens.
[UPDATE]:Again, in 30 minutes all funds were depleted. This time, I got 1600+ clicks for my $50. Lesson #1: do not believe the $0.20 minimum bid bullshit. They clearly can’t fill their inventory, so bid low. You aren’t bidding against anyone. I’m a bit upset by this, because AdMob essentially lied to me.
Tomorrow morning I’ll report the effect this run had on sales, but I’m not holding my breath. Remember, if there is no jump in sales, it means $100 and 2000+ clicks directly to the app store are utterly useless. I’m hoping this is not the case.
[UPDATE 2]: Got the sales figures. No change in sales whatsoever. It is now confirmed that AdMob is a total waste of money.
I invite someone from AdMob to get in touch with me and explain this. There is some serious, serious click fraud going on here, or an abundance of accidental clicks, or something. Something is terribly wrong with your system. I am now getting reports from a lot of other people saying their experience was identical.
An iPhone Rant Follow-up
March 2, 2009
One of the reasons I wrote the iPhone rant three weeks ago is that I wanted to lay out my initial reactions to the iPhone SDK, XCode and developing for Apple products in general.
It has now been three weeks since I made that post, and in the meantime I have finished 5 iPhone apps — one of which is in the app store, 3 that are in the pipe, and one which will be submitted shortly. I also have 3 more in development.
Let’s start there: in three weeks, I’ve built 5 apps. Fast development is something I’ve always loved about developing for mobile platforms. This is especially true when developing games. While there are developers out there building complicated game engines for the iPhone, I see a huge opportunity for small, simple, one-man projects that can be conceived, developed and shipped in a matter of days.
The app store seems to agree with me. The top games for the iPhone over the past couple months have been simple modern-day updates to retro game concepts (example: iShoot) or casual/puzzle games (example: Blocked).
That’s all wonderful, but not necessarily unique to the iPhone. What is unique to the iPhone is the huge market they’ve created — a market of people willing to spend a buck on a temporary diversion.
So what about XCode? I’ve started to become accustomed to working with XCode, but I have to say the little annoyances have become big ones. Again, I think I’ve become spoiled by well thought-out IDEs like Visual Studio and even Eclipse.
So in short, I’m getting used to it. Stay tuned for blog posts announcing my iPhone projects, as soon as I figure out how to link to iTunes.
