Advertising Campaigns?

[AppStoreGamer]

Hey! I was wondering if any of you guys have had any success with advertising your apps (AdWords, AbMob, etc)

I tried admob but it didn't show many signs of improvement in sales...maybe i just have to raise the Pay Per Click cost....

Put up pics/charts if you have em!

[brewstermax]

Originally Posted by AppStoreGamer

Hey! I was wondering if any of you guys have had any success with advertising your apps (AdWords, AbMob, etc)

I tried admob but it didn't show many signs of improvement in sales...maybe i just have to raise the Pay Per Click cost....

Put up pics/charts if you have em!

This is just the opinion of a customer, but I never click on the ads. I don't know about anyone else, but I never bother. Plus they are usually discrete enough to just ignore. Unless you go the Spinner Free route (with huge banner ads at the beginning of the game) you aren't going to notice much.

[inkstar]

PPC campaigns need to be highly optimized.

Also... How many are searching specifically for iphone games on the search engines?
How many of those keywords that you are aiming for will yield in a sale?

Lets say that you are selling the iphone game Rollando for example.

What will be your keywords?
iPhone Game; iPhone Games - Those are clearly to wide searchterms to make
any sales. Those who search these terms might not be looking to buy games at all.

I think that unless your game/app has a very specific function, you wont be able
to find the right keywords to yield enough sales for your app to have your conversion
rate in check.

If you disagree with me, that's fine I truly wish you the best of luck and It is completely possible that I'm 100% wrong here. I have some experience in high
yielding PPC campaigns but it took allot of time to find the very right keywords that
had high conversion rate. The way we did it was with tons of research, lots of
fishing around. monitoring the bad money wasting keywords from those who where
actually making money. After a few months of trial and error we had a dozen few that
where making consistent conversions and we could pour money into those with confident .

My advice! would be to built a website where you are strategically involving other
high interest topics of those who are your customers ( iphone buying peeps ).

These topics could be about the device ( iphone - ipod touch ), these could be
jail breaking news, WHATEVER you think sparks interest of your customer base!

The you use these specific topics in your PPC campaigns to get very narrow search terms that have high enough search volume. ( avoid the big search volume like fire )

From there you can advertise your game products on that blog or web page.

Just my friendly advice how you could possible have the best use of PPC for iphone games.

[arn]

Originally Posted by brewstermax

This is just the opinion of a customer, but I never click on the ads. I don't know about anyone else, but I never bother. Plus they are usually discrete enough to just ignore. Unless you go the Spinner Free route (with huge banner ads at the beginning of the game) you aren't going to notice much.

He's talking about advertising your game so people will buy it. not in-game ads.

arn

[arn]

Originally Posted by inkstar

PPC campaigns need to be highly optimized.

The biggest problem with optimized ads for iTunes game or app sales is that you never know your conversion rate. You can't tell what % of clicks turn into sales. Without that variable, it's hard to figure out what your return is.

unfortunately, there's no real solution to that problem.

arn

[brewstermax]

Originally Posted by arn

He's talking about advertising your game so people will buy it. not in-game ads.

arn

Ohh. I thought that he was referring to the ads like at the bottom of TTR. Those say Admob on them.

[inkstar]

Originally Posted by arn

The biggest problem with optimized ads for iTunes game or app sales is that you never know your conversion rate. You can't tell what % of clicks turn into sales. Without that variable, it's hard to figure out what your return is.

unfortunately, there's no real solution to that problem.

arn

Yes, Itunes is hard/impossible to my knowledge to track. but with optimized I'm not talking tracking, Im talking about optimizing your ad groups. ( 50.000 keywords into a 25 keywords per group associated with and AD for that group so the AD will always be highly relevant to that group of keywords )

We found a solution to track normal campaigns where we have access to
the sales system but not bothered with thinking about PPC for itunes game marketing.

The solution is PAIN! but works. ( for conventional tracking )

What we do is that we make a special landing page for every single keyword group in our campaign. We see how many click the Buy link on that page and from there we have a tracking link that tracks the customer from the landing page to the thank you page ( the one that shows after purchase ).

[AppStoreGamer]

Originally Posted by arn

The biggest problem with optimized ads for iTunes game or app sales is that you never know your conversion rate. You can't tell what % of clicks turn into sales. Without that variable, it's hard to figure out what your return is.

unfortunately, there's no real solution to that problem.

arn

Well, check out AdMob....they claim to have the solution for tracking PPC/actual iTunes transactions. They get your device's identifier code (unique to each device) when you click on the ad. The Identifier is then stored on their server along with which ad you clicked on. Then, AdMob asks you to install a little snipet of code in your app that basically sends your app ID along with the purchaser's Identifier code back to their servers...they cross refrence the Identifier ID with the ones that clicked on that ads and tell you how many people who clicked on the ads actually bought your product....

While this is a very smart idea, we have no way of making sure if AdMob is making up the numbers they present to you or if they are actual numbers. But like I said before, head on over to AdMob or go here:

http://developer.admob.com/wiki/AppStoreDownloads

[arn]

Originally Posted by AppStoreGamer

Well, check out AdMob....they claim to have the solution for tracking PPC/actual iTunes transactions. They get your device's identifier code (unique to each device) when you click on the ad.

Interesting. Of course that only works for app-based ads. Not web-based ads.

arn

[Solitaire City]

I tried advertising with Admob. They spammed my e-mail and offered me a 100% match rate, ie, if I put in $500 then they'd add $500 credit for free. I'd usually just dump e-mail like that straight in the trash, but I'm open to marketing experimentation so I thought "what the hell ?". It sounded decent because AdMob link the inquisitive directly to your App's iTunes order page so they're just one tap away from putting beer in the developers pint pot. The bidding was incredibly low compared to Google Ads so I picked the lowest rate I could which was between 3c to 5c per click. According to their reports, I was receiving quite an impressive number of click throughs per day - in that I ate through $250 worth of ad-credit pretty damn quick - like in about a day. I just wanted to see what effect it had on my sales seeing as they were matching my rate 1:1 but I can honestly say, that I really didn't see any real positive ROI after burning through $1200 pretty quick so I won't be using them again. I'm not saying that paid advertising doesn't work .... just that whenever I've tried it, it's been useless. I've tried Google Ads in the past to try to increase the sales of my Windows and Pocket PC versions of Solitaire City and have seen very underwhelming results. It's actually possible with Google to track your conversion rate because you insert some javascript in the HTML of your order confirmation pages and whenever someone buys your game it racks up the sale with Google so you can see exactly how effective your ads are in respect to how much you're paying for your Ads ..... and it was negative ROI for me. That was maybe because of the type of game I'm selling or the way my website looks or god know what, but I'm just saying that whenever I've tried paid advertising for Solitaire City it has been crap. Admob is worse because you have no way of figuring out your conversion rate .... which is probably a good thing for them. I just went by Apple's daily sales data and didn't notice anything too exciting over the two weeks I used Admob's paid advertising. I've also tried Yahoo Ads and a couple of adverts 1/2 page full colour ads in high profile magazines with similar unimpressive results. However, whenever I've released an update to Solitaire City to the App Store I've seen my sales double for about 10 days regardless of what was in the update so I recommend developers to update often. Getting exposure on iTunes and on the devices App Store via the charts and New Releases lists is the absolute key to making big money, which of course is why so many developers have sold out to the $0.99 price range - an evil practice I refuse to succumb to btw. Also translate your App's description to as many languages as possible because that also increased Solitaire City's sales dramatically. There's definitely an untapped market in France, Japan, the UK and some other major European countries to an extent. I now make more money from total European sales than the US. It's also a lot easier to venture into that elusive top 100 in various categories in Europe than the US - like 50 sales might get you into the top 100 in Games in France which will really boost your sales but you need 400+ in the US right now just to get a sniff in the top 100 in Games so it's worth spending some time and money targeting countries outside the US. I wouldn't do it with paid advertising though. Find ways to pimp your Apps for free. Apple splitting the games category into sub categories has been a gift from the gods though.

Anyway, I'm more interested in hearing about how much a developer can earn by including AdMob's ads in their own Apps rather than using their pay per tap services. I've closing in on 1 million downloads of Solitaire City Lite and so if there's decent dosh to be earned from AdMob clicks then I'm up for it ..... so if anyone is willing to release their weekly/monthly AdMob revenue and corresponding iTunes Connect download rates for their free ad driven Apps then please post away !