I admit having mixed feeling about internet advertising. I guess at present, I view it as a necessary evil in which I happen to participate. As I can hardly muster my thoughts into coherence on THAT subject, instead, here’s a bit on how it is working out for me.
So “paid” apps on the Android Market are not making money for most developers. There may be a host of reasons, but I suspect it has to do with iPhone users being very comfortable with the $0.99 music purchases from iTunes and applying the same mentality to the App Store, while Android users simply aren’t used to pulling the trigger. Free apps, on the other hand, do just fine.
The conversion rate from free to paid on my two popular apps?
1/10,000 and 1/1,000. No joke. 400,00 free downloads. 40 paid.
Since that sucks, like many folks, I’ve resorted to using Ads to make some money from free apps.
After showing ads for awhile, I thought it would be an interesting to try promoting my newest app by BUYING some ads as well.
First, I setup 2 House Ads, which are free, but only show up in your own applications. (So you can advertise your own stuff, but you don’t make any money). Over a week, these have had a rather good click-thru rate of 4.44%.
For the experiment, I spent $50 (the minimum allowed) for one day of regular advertising on AdMob, creating two ads identical to my House Ads. Surprisingly, these had a much lower click-thru rate of 0.47% (from 353,690 impressions).
I’m not sure what to make of this, but the most obvious conclusion seems to be that my purchased ads were badly targeted. Oddly, when creating ads, you can choose some basic demographic information like location, age and gender, but you don’t get to target specific keywords. However, as an app publisher, you *do* get to target keywords. How does that work? I can only guess that they match the keywords against the 35 (max) letters of the ad text. But that can’t possibly be reliable in the same way as matching a long webpage body text. Maybe they do it manually? That would explain the 24 hour-ish ad approval period.. Hmm…
Anyway, kinda guessing a bit, since there’s not a good way to know when each download occurred and whether it was an ad click-thru or a normal download, it looks like the $50 netted about 1000 downloads. Or, about $0.05 per download.
That’s on a free app, by the way. Paid apps will likely have a MUCH lower conversion, resulting in a higher cost per download.
So, is it worth it? Well, that’s hard to say. My current feeling is that it might be worth it initially to bootstrap a new app with a couple thousand downloads. When people download an app, they see a range indicating the approximate number of downloads (1-50, 50-250, etc..) I think it inspires confidence to see that an app has been downloaded 10,000 times. Also, more downloads seems to mean higher rankings in the “Top Free” section, more or less..
However, my most popular app, which was never advertised, has nearly 400,000 downloads. That would cost $20,000!! (yeah, I know that estimate makes *tons* of assumptions) So paid advertising is certainly not a viable way to get all the way to the top of the “Top Free” section.
Anyway, I would be interested in anyone else’s experiences with advertising free apps on AdMob.
One point to note, the AdMob Help seems to indicate that you need to pay a higher CPC rate if you want your ads to be shown. In my experience, that was not the case. Even with the lowest $0.03, my ads still got shown over 350k times. So don’t pay $0.20 for each click! Furthermore, as an app publisher, I rarely see a 100% fill rate. While the reality may be more complicated, that seems to indicate that there are too many publishers and not enough advertisers.