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.
So what is it that you are complaining about? That you did not sell the app? Or that you did not get any clicks? You clearly got clicks. Which is the service you paid for.
Just because no one purchased you app does not mean that the company that directed people towards it failed. If I sat on the side of the busiest sidewalk in the country and tried to sell my used underwear I would not be surprised if after 2000 people took at a look at my wares, no one purchased it.
I am not saying that your app is like used underwear, I am sure it is great. but just because someone looks at it does not mean they are going to buy it.
Phaddie, this isn’t rocket science. He’s complaining that the clicks are either fraudulent or accidental. CTR isn’t the only thing you look at when evaluating an ad network. A much more important metric is conversion rate.
If you can’t get people to download even a FREE app after they take the time to click the ad for that very app — i.e. if the conversion rate is ridiculously low — there is a problem with the ad network.
Hmmm… I think his app was not free. If it was then I agree that something was wrong with the ad network. On the other hand if it was an ad for the sale of an app I still think that some of the problem may be with the app’s market appeal and not the ad network.
Ad networks like this make the most money if they are not that successful. They get paid for people to look around not for people to buy a product. These ad network companies neglect to tell people that marketing will not sell a bad product, they make money if the products are bad.
Again, I am not saying that the original posters product is crap, I am just saying that having people look at something that is for sale is in no way a guarantee that it will be purchased, and that making claims about the quality of the ad service may not be justified. I do however think that these ad networks are leeches and they prey on people who have little to no experience selling a product. They put forward false beliefs and raise expectations to un-realistic levels.
Phaddie, read the follow up to this post. He did it with a free app.
I got the exact same results as you. I found your site by googling “admob waste”
For me it was 120,000 impressions, 400 clicks, 0 buys. For a 99 cent app.
Even as an advertizer their payout is so obscenely low, that it’s basically impossible to make money. At 3 cents per click, I’m getting about 1 - 1.5 cents per click on average after their cut. Can you image the kind of traffic you’d need with a typical CTR to even support one developer? Even if you had the entire iPhone market you’d barely be scraping by.
I got the exact same results as you. I found your site by googling “admob waste”
For me it was 120,000 impressions, 400 clicks, 0 buys. For a 99 cent app.
Even as an advertizer their payment is so obscenely low, that it’s basically impossible to make money. At 3 cents per click, I’m getting about 1 - 1.5 cents per click on average. Can you image the kind of traffic you’d need with a typical CTR to even support one developer? Even if you had the entire iPhone market you’d barely be scraping by.
[…] be sure whether the users will tap the "ads" displayed periodically on the app. Read this and this I’m now still using AdMob because I haven’t been able to release a high quality app, and […]
Got the same result but…
On a FREE app that’s rated 4.5 of 5 on Android Market.
Something is completely messed up over there i mean if you target for Android only, label your ad properly and don’t even get e proper jump in free downloads.
I think until AdMob lets you really target users with context-driven ads (like AdWords does) then its scattergun approach is going to prove to be too expensive for all but those apps that have a chance of appealing to everyone.
The app in this case, probably only appeals to people in the same age-group as the guy’s sister who the app was written for, so those are the people you want to target.
PS - I found the following stats with AdMob:
$50 for 15 mins of advertising (thank god I did not put more in my account..)
112,000 impressions
1,666 click throughs
2 sales
so 1% click through rate
about a 0.1% sales conversion rate.
Anyone know of any ad publishers that let you add context? I asked this question of AdMob but they did not understand. They said I could already target people via geography and phone model…
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We have done some more detailed analysis on traffic received from Admob using our Mobile Analytics platform and found aroudn13%-15% click fraud. We specifically looked for repeated clicks from the same handsets which did not go beyond the landing page. One person clicked our ad 458 times, bouncing straight off every time.
We have written this up on our blog at:
http://amethon.typepad.com/amethon_insights/2009/08/admob-marketplace-burning-cash-and-fighting-clickfraud.html?utm_source=Stromcode
Cheers,
Michael Stone
Amethon Solutions
Here’s how my $50 went:
Impressions: 91k
Clicks: 1,666
Buys: 4
That means I paid about $12.50 for each buyer of my $0.99 app.
I was about to create an ad and put $200 in account hoping for a 30 day ad run. But with this awesome review and suggestions from people am sure the $200 will turn out in 1 hour. I can surely see this. Thinking of creating an ad on some app review sites. Not sure which one though.
admob still best for publisher, dont know for advertiser :s
Why on earth would you try to sell a 99 cent item in this way? It is just madness! Given that your take is about 70 cents per item, your Break Even Point (ie the number of sales you need just to recoup your $100 advertising spend) is a whopping 143!!! Are you out of your mind? If your conversion rate is 5%, then you need at least 2860 people to click through to your ad (and that’s BEFORE taking account of fraud).
Seriously, you should not consider this type of PPC advertising UNLESS you are selling an item that returns a healthy margin per sale and/or provides you with recurring income (such as a membership).
Unless what you are offering is the elixir of youth, you will NEVER, EVER see a dime in profilts, selling a 99 cent product in this way.
Wow, am I a fool. I should have came to this site first. I blew over $300 in 2 weeks, and didn’t make a dime. Not one sale. And I had 4 campaigns going at once. One campaign alone had 300,000 impressions, but only 2800 clicks. I thought maybe, It was just a product that no one wanted. Now that I came to this site, and read all of your comments. I’m convinced, that there is something wrong with Admob.
Thanks for sharing your experience. After hearing many similar experiences from friends developing apps, I noticed that there was something fundamentally wrong with CPC and advertising iPhone Apps.
1. We (developers) need to know/estimate the conversation (downloads/clicks) of our apps before bidding for CPC. (The lower the conversation we estimate the lower the bid–thus, we are always are going to aim at the lowest number –as close to $0.00 as we can get)
2. As more brand advertisers (Lexus, Coca Cola, etc) join the mobile advertising,
its going to be very hard to bid low CPC rates, meaning our ROI on our ads is going to low/and or negative as in your case.
As co-founder of Presiso (www.presiso.com), we have been working on an advertising platform for the iPad/iPhone that let’s app developers share appstore revenue with publishers. Meaning that you don’t pay for advertising—you only pay for downloads. You only pay publishers an agreed percentage of your app’s price.
We are welcoming developers/publishers to participate in our pilot campaign, if anyone is interested. I can be reached via twitter @moreno_raul for any questions/comments/ideas/suggestions.
Thank you for sharing your experience—hopefully our system can avoid similar experiences in the future.
STOP WHINING!
Do any of you have advertising experience? Ever created a campaign budget?
The amount of traffic you are generating for $50 is remarkable, now sink $5k into your efforts and respond with your results.
Same thing happen to us with our FREE app. Not to mention all our analytics show our app is very addictive. So it’s not possible to get the amount of click we got on our ad to have no conversions. I’m done with admob. It seems like there is either click fraud or the clicks are reported wrong. Either or I’m done.
Same thing happen to us with our FREE app. Not to mention all our analytics show our app is very addictive. So it’s not possible to get the amount of click we got on our ad to have no conversions. I’m done with admob. It seems like there is either click fraud or the clicks are reported wrong. Either or I’m done.
Oh I’m so glad I’ve read this! I’ve just registered on Admob and somthing inside me thought the $50 min purchase was a bit steap (how many people actually have 5k to blow on marketing budgets?) but was prepared to give it a try for $50.
Granted the prospect of some of the clicks being fruad did cross my mind, but I thought seeing as it’s a google company, it would be legit.
Clearly I’m wrong and you guys are right.
Thanks
I think one of the previous posters is right…the price has to be right to make up for th lower quality traffic.
There is always a lot of fraud and poor targeting on these newer advertising platforms until they get their act together. With Googles huge experience, I think they will whip this company into shape in no time…but selling $0.99 apps with typical online conversion rates isn’t going to make you rich.
You need to understand your customers lifetime value and optimise your sales funnel to overcome the problems with these networks.
Hi,
can anyone explain to me why I have my ad approved since yesterday and I’ve bid 1 cent above the minimum bid..but I’ve got NO impressions at all? What could cause that? Their help section is bloody rubbish! No faq or nothing.
I’d really appreciate if someone chimed in
Hi!
Same thing for me, I have 3 campaigns running since morning, one campaign get 12 impressions and 6 clicks in first hour, after that during the whole day less than hundret impressions zero clicks, second campaign has 8!!! impressions during the day, third no impressions at all, either I’m doin something wrong or there is something wrong with admob, any ideas?