The Elusive Female: Developing for Women

Females have long been an untapped market when it comes to tech and software.  Game publishers know this better than anyone, but nearly every corner of entertainment software would like to attract more female customers.  Glowdot Productions “Zen Jar” app for the iPhone seems to have accidentally stumbled onto the secret.  I’ll take a look at why the app appeals to women. Read more

AdMob: Our Experience

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.

AreYouCompatible?

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.

Making Money on the Internet

It’s been almost a year and a half since I started making enough money with Glowfoto to allow myself to work on it full time. In that time, the question I’m most often asked is how can I do it too? So I guess it’s time to talk a little bit about how to take that website of yours and bring more in than you are putting out.

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