Let's look at theoretical numbers. Say you have a mediocre conversion rate of 1%. At 30c per click it will cost you $30 to make a $2 sale. Thus, the most you could have expected from this venture is like $3, but even worse, you managed to not figure on Apple taking 30%, so your'e back to $2 in potential money on a $50 spend.
Ouch.
Next time bid a penny and see what happens. At a penny you could profitably sell your app at a 1% conversion rate. That's $1 cost to make $1.40. Not great money, but it's at least got potential and if you got enough volume of sales you could become a top app and make some sick money.
Also, never listen to Ad Networks on what to bid. Bid based on YOUR profitability, not THEIRS. If you can't afford more than a penny a click, then fine, move on.
In retrospect, yeah, I feel like an idiot for bidding the suggested bid. I've run pretty substantial campaigns on both facebook and google adwords though, and always had good experience bidding somewhere within 20% of the bid.
I also maybe was slightly duped by this statement after setting moderately restricted targeting:
"You have selected market area or demographic targeting options. As a result, you will receive significantly fewer impressions."
But thanks, and for anyone reading this, don't advertise paid apps on Admob, and don't bid anything higher than $0.10 if you have a small campaign.
PPC usually does not make sense for smaller per sales pricing. The numbers make even less sense for Amazon affiliate marketing.
Perhaps lead generation instead?
Don't try to initially sell your app, instead, obtain the contact info for your potential customer, and you can sell him/her many different things, including apps, but also books and other products/services.
Also, you will be able to track these customers and know which are most likely to respond to your multiple offerings.
I don't think this reflects poorly on Admob at all - more that paying 30c per click lead for a $2 app doesn't work, and $50 isn't a sample size.
even at a 5% conversion rate from click to purchase (highly unlikely - for this type of app you are talking about less than 1%) your customer cost of acquisition would be $6. do the math.
with these apps you have to be looking at review sites, social media, blogs (like you have now), link exchange with other apps, making it free and putting ads in it, etc. the hit rate is very very low.
Agreed, in retrospect the CPC bid was stupidly high. They suggested ~$0.28 after we set our targeting...I guess I trusted google since their Adwords suggestions are generally pretty accurate.
We also ran a $50 campaign previously though I didn't include it in this post. We didn't even realize we had run the campaign-- 1200+ clicks at a $0.04 CPC in minutes.
We thought our payment had never processed, but when we checked our bank account it had-- it's just that Admob spent our budget so quickly we didn't realize it.
Mobile ads are not the means to acquire new customers. Relationships with review sites, blogs, and other media outlets is your best bet. A good review can get you some pretty good uptake. We got reviewed in several Android blogs and reached 18k downloads in a little under a week (our app was free).
I haven't experimented much with mobile ads primarily because they aren't effective and won't ever be effective. At least, that's what the studies say :).
Link?! My preparation for Admob was admittedly limited to one or two google searches and a scan of a few blog posts, but I would love to read more if you would link to said studies.
Okay...now I am a tool and can't find that study...but here is my personal account of reviewers helping downloads for my old application.
We got written up in Thrillist boston, Phandroid, Androinica, Droid-Life, TalkAndroid, and Gizmodo. From all of these review sites we reached roughly ~18k downloads in a week (our product is a fantasy football app).
While the majority of those downloads came from Gizmodo, we definitely would not have been able to get there without being written up on all the other blogs.
From those 18k downloads, we averaged about 11k active through the first 3 weeks of the application and it steadily declined after that (assuming that they were bored of their fantasy league or moved on to another app).
The thought behind the reviewers is if its a source that is trustworthy or has built a following, their post/review is more meaningful than an ad. These reviewers are an AMAZING source of word of mouth for app developers while an ad is simply a pay to click.
If you want to see a chart of our downloads over time, I'd be more than willing to share to show you the value of these relationships as opposed to a one and done ad campaign :).
Emotionally shocking, yes, but what is really expected? Why _should_ the ads be spread "evenly throughout the day"? esp. for such a pittance? The spread has no advantage. Google is handling a deluge of data, and he wants a controlled long-term distribution of a few miniscule tidbits. Yes, expecting Google to behave an obvious way makes emotional sense; methinks it's all just happening on such a vast scale he/we don't grok that blowing $50 on ads in seconds does, in fact, make sense.
Mobile ads are largely a money drain. Most clicks are accidental and will not lead to a sale. I'd only recommend using AdMob if you are promoting a free app and are doing a burst campaign to break into the Top 25 chart of a particular category.
Secondly, a $50 budget is peanuts and paying $0.25/click for relatively un-targeted admob clicks is crazy. We normally pay $0.05/click for such crappy traffic.
We've spent 1000's on mobile ads and it's only an effective strategy for pushing your downloads a bit higher so that you have a better chance of hitting a 'gold spot' in the charts. E.g. when you are 26th and you want to get into top 25.
I agree. The ~$0.25 CPC bid was suggested, we actually only decided to go with the suggested bid because they had warned us that demographic targeting would limit exposure.
We actually ran a similar campaign a few days previous where we had over 1,000 clicks at a .04 CPC and didn't see any increase in downloads.
Fair point. I think the lesson learned was that the targeting that we thought we were employing was not nearly as effective as we had anticipated (25-44, limited geographic area, iphone 3GS, iPhone4, iPad2).
We also were just amazed at the clicks registered in just seconds. The stat reports were already in and email alerts received in less than 2 minutes time. (Daily Budget and "Spread throughout the day" notwithstanding)
I ran a $50 Admob campaign over the weekend for a new FREE app we have on the Android Market. It did exactly what I needed it to, it got me about a hundred downloads. Today, that app has a little over 400 active users.
The ball has started rolling, and it only took $50.
THAT BEING SAID, the first time I ran an Admob campaign, I had just about the same experience as this writer.
Admob works great for getting lite-version, free, download apps a little traction. I will never again run it for a paid app.
IN-FACT, in the Android Dev Console, you'll notice that only your free apps have the "Advertise this App" link next to them. I assume that Google probably is very aware that Admob campaigns can work great for free apps, but it's a different ball game when it comes to paid apps.
Lastly, I'd like to add that I took the time to create a graphical banner for my free app ad that made a BIG call to action - Download my new puzzle game for free.
In retrospect (and maybe this should be a follow-up experiment), we should have advertised ONLY our free, limited version and focused on getting the cheapest CPC possible.
$50 at a $0.02 CPC would yield 2500 clicks. For a free app, if we saw a 10% download (a very healthy assumption I know) that would be 250 downloads of the free app.
Maybe after proving the value of the app with limits, we get approximately 10% to convert to paying of the 250 downloads.
That's 25 paid, or ~50 pre apple tax. Still losing money with very healthy assumptions, but I think we'll try this as well...even after the negative experiment and will post our results.
I just want to say thanks for posting your experiences. Everyone here is ragging on you for "too small sample size" and "u did it wrong" but I appreciate that you came forward and shared.
For the people who scoff at a $50 ad budget, that just tells me they've never done this with their own money. It's easy to brag about campaign size when you're spending out of someone else's wallet.
If you want guaranteed results, use a cost-per-install campaign. I work at an ad network that specializes in these kinds of campaigns.[1] You'll have to pay a lot per-install, considering how poor conversions are going to be. Our network automatically calculates your eCPM on the fly and will rank campaigns according to that—and so too it works with most competitors' network.
To be honest, with your tiny budget and a two dollar app, there's no effective way to spend your money with a positive return on investment.
The only ad platform I have ever had any success with is Reddit's cheap $20 self serve ads. I haven't tried any Facebook ads though so there's that giant I have yet to try out. Reddit's great though mainly for the feedback and people who are actually interested in what you're selling and willing to critique/x post your ad.
I experimented with AdMob and JumpTap over a few months with budgets ranging between low tens to low thousands for each campaign and even for an app that was $5, it basically didn't work.
I didn't get good results with Facebook either, but maybe due to the nature of your app, it'd be better.
Ditto for Adwords.
I only dabbled slightly with Reddit and it seemed that it would show some promise if I invested more time in it.
You might also consider paid downloads promotions. Something like http://tapzilla.com/ (YC S10). The co-founders Edmond and Francis are both helpful and responsive when I run a campaign. It wasn't the right avenue for my app, but Fotobook sounds like a better fit, as a utility and at lower price point. I'm not sure if Apple's recent foray against paid downloads affects them.
To help capitalize on all the HN traffic, you might want to include a more prominent link to fotobookapp.com (probably in the first sentence when you introduce the app). It took me a while to see the link at the end of the article.
Also, the "App Store" link in your posterous profile doesn't actually link anywhere.
A year ago, Google was doling out results at a rate of 34,000 searches per SECOND. In your case, that's filtering and spreading your ad across some 3.4 million searches. Not unreasonable to assume your demographic restrictions fit about 1% of those searches; the limits sound narrow, yet seem candidates for the largest group of Google power users (whom I would independently assume are dominated by 25-45yo upper-economic-half US state residents owning camera-laden iOS devices).
You're trying to take a drink from Niagara Falls and wondering why you're soaked. (Been there, done that. Memorable, but not productive.)
I do not know how the author's application retrieves Facebook photos, but I believe that Facedown (which was a desktop application, not a web app) was shut down because not because it was saving photo albums, but because it required users to input their Facebook credentials into it and tried to download photos by scraping album information (by pretending to be a web browser).
I have operated a reasonably popular Facebook application that has similar photo saving functionality (using their API), and not have not run into any issues. It has transformed from a desktop application using the REST API to a Graph API using web application at http://socialphotodownload.com . Unlike Facedown, I try to follow Facebook's Platform Policies.
How does it make a difference at all? Unless what you are promoting can't take the traffic, it's irrelevant. When you're paying CPC you have no reason to care when the clicks come in, 10 clicks a day for three days isn't any worse or better than 30 clicks in five minutes.
As long as it doesn't spend more than the customer wanted to spend, it's irrelevant.
Let's say I want to spend. If I have $500 to spend, and I want to pay CPC, how is getting $500 worth of clicks in 45 minutes worse than getting $500 worth of clicks over three days?
I think it is relevant because it's wrong. Unless it says somewhere that it's a suggestion or it probably won't work like that.
If you tell AdMob to not spend more than $15 a day and then it immediately spends triple that amount I wouldn't say that's giving you a fair shake on what they promised.
AdMob sucks. IMO they do this on purpose to discourage small publishers. I've also heard, from a reliable source, that they also send you worse traffic until your account is more "established", and if your early CTR sucks, you may never get the bump. I've heard of people having to start new accounts after their first few campaigns do poorly.
I suggest you try InMobi and AdModa. (Not affiliated with either except that I've been happy with the traffic I bought there)
Because you might have a $500 testing budget and want to test how your campaign does over the course of the week. You lose out on valuable data even if your $500 in a few minutes converts well.
I liked the first comment (in the post) by Andrew Maine. Basically, it's simple math. If you expect a 5% conversion on a $1.99 app (which will earn you $1.39 after Apple's cut), the most you can spend for a viable business model is 6 or 7 cents per click.
Less if you want to make an actual profit on the app and not just get more users. But then, if you want more users, maybe the app should be free?
But once you make a conversion, do you have any way to subsequently contact that same user to make them aware of your other app/service/product offerings?
Also, if the app is recurring billing, the formula changes completely.
I know I'm not the only one who feels really sorry for the fellow. I'm imagining him sitting by his laptop and scrupulously making sure his target demographics are correct for his ad campaign, and this nonsense happens. Google should make it clear in the FAQ that your campaign will be short lived if you ad funds under a certain amount.
