I created a facebook fan page and did some facebook advertising, I think it helped somewhat, it certainly helped build up a nice fan base on the page.
We tried advertising through Admob and received a few downloads through it, but the cost per download greatly exceeded the 99 cent price of our app. If someone has more money to play around with, they could try targeting different ad copy, demographics, etc. and see if they get better results.
I've got an ad pending right now. I've put $50 into it and only target U.S users on wifi networks, so we'll see what happens.
I am biting the bullet and trying this fancy admob thing. TOFTT I'll let you know tomorrow what the results were.
we tried a few months back with advertising over AdMob - 100$ went in minutes and we didn't see any changes we also tried using the home ads, similarly - no changes noticeable so we gave up on both
I have never tried admob but from experiances with apps it's in you usually accidentally tap on it instead of tapping it because you think it's cool. I've never even looked at The admob ad or come close to buying it.
over 24 hours later: $33.50 spent 32,493 impressions 167 clicks 0 new purchases It's too bad this isn't a CPA rather than CPC. I think most clickers may just be curious and click to check it out. Admob is strange. I run house ads on my light version which says "Upgrade now for $1.99". There's a very high CTR but 0 purchases. The light version states what the full version has. Maybe it's accidental clicks (even though the game didn't require touching the screen except for menu selections).
From what I've seen, Admob is horrible from driving traffic to a game. It will _never_ pay for itself, so your best hope is that you spend so much money that you're able to get around the abysmal conversion (which isn't specific to Admob .. it's just the way these things work) and use the additional downloads to improve your rank and increase exposure on the App Store. That dollar amount is very significant and definitely shouldn't be your only method for driving traffic. For that matter, out of all the methods for driving traffic, I think Admob (and advertising in general) may be the least cost effective. At least with the other ad options (review site take overs, etc) there's a level of brand building and awareness. Greystripe just started a $1 CPA ad unit for iPhone apps, but unfortunately it's for free apps only.
