I was wondering if anyone had any experience running and Ad campaign and what network works the best. I can probably throw a few hundred dollars at it. I'm sure that's not nearly enough to get a huge audience, but I'd like to see if it's remotely worth it. Here's the game I'm trying to advertise in case you guys have any feedback. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/creature-chaos/id734747652?mt=8
Being a game developer myself, I have plenty of experince with different Ad Networks. Classic networks like Chartboost is crazy for small devs, because the CPI is driven up by guys who can spend 4$ per install (Supercell, Gree). Use Chartboost for cross promo with other devs. What seems to work now are Facebeook ads (but expensive as well). I'd recommend to focus everything you can (paid and free exposure, even launching update) to one day. Excellent for that is using an Add Discovery platform, which focus on single day exposure. It drives the game up in charts which gains organic users Appdown is such a service, but the good thing is that CPI starts at 20 cents. Which is very affordable! Any devs interested in affordable push please contact me via PM.
We have tried out Admobs, App Flood, Ad Fonics, Millennium Media and FB. AdMobs seemed to work fairly well. Although they are going with some changes and you cannot add a new ad currently in some countries. MMedia was ok and we did get some installs from them. They weren't too expensive either. Ad Fonics we feel used up our balance really fast and we didn't notice any change in the download numbers. I think these guys are not real and the analytics are not right. Stay away from them. App Flood. You really need to give a high ecpm or else you are going to land up with nothing. FB. really really expensive. We were paying almost 8$ per install. Do not get in if you do no have the money for the campaign. I mean they have clients like samsung that pay them nearly 1 million dollars a campaign!! Hope this helps.
Thanks for the info. I think I'm going to try to run an AdMob campaign with a small amount of money. I'll post my results here as I get data. I'll probably start it later tonight or tomorrow.
Here are the results from a quick AdMob campaign. I decided to only invest a small amount of money into the ad campaign. I went with 5 days with a $10 budget per day, just to see if there was any noticeable improvement. So the day before I ran the ads I had 55 downloads. Day 1 with Ads: 80 Day 2 with Ads: 80 Day 3 with Ads: 71 Day 4 with Ads: 76 Day 5 with Ads: 77 Day 6 no Ads: 51 Day 7 no Ads: 41 Based on the data I'm assuming 30 or so downloads were coming from ads. That means I was paying about $0.30 per install, which from what I've read is pretty damn good. Every day my $10 were used pretty much instantly, which leads me to believe if I sent more money I'd get quite a bit more downloads quickly. My plan was to throw a large sum of money at ads in 1 day to hopefully get a huge jump in the charts. I was thinking something around 1k, which if I was getting 1 install per $0.3 I was assuming somewhere around 3000 downloads in a day. Unfortunately my marketing budget got wiped out due to unforeseen circumstances. So It'll be a while before I can run this test.