YMMV: This blog post describes our personal experience with Google Admob. If you've had a similar or different experience, please leave comments on this blog or over at this Hacker News post:
We recently launched Fotobook, an iPhone application which lets you download your tagged Facebook photos and your friends' photo albums locally to your iPhone. We thought there was a decently healthy market for this: Facebook Users who also own iPhones. (Or iPhone users who use Facebook, either way).
Our marketing techniques ran the gamut: SEM, Facebook Ads, In App Sharing, App Reviews etc... We witnessed a few spikes in downloads here and there, though none of them were remarkable.
We have some experience setting up Facebook and SEM campaigns, but with iOS apps, these mediums leave much to be desired. We decided to experiment a bit with PPC campaigns on Admob. We were particularly attracted to their ability to track downloads, since this close to impossible with most iOS marketing.
So we entered the Admob world. We're a small development shop, and we figured for a first experiment that we'd invest $50 spread out through a few days. We purchased $50 worth of credits on our card through Google Checkout and set the campaign budget to $15 / day. For the "Daily Budget", we selected:
"Standard - Show Ads Evenly Throughout the Day"
Note the google checkout confirmation email at 2:47pm:
I figured this would give me a good benchmark of Admob performance and would give me time to track with our analytics to see gauge the positive effect.
We strongly focused the targeting, even though we figured it would severely restrict clicks:
- Male / Female
- 25-44 yrs old
- Only in 28 states in the US, All of England, Singapore, and a few locations in Australia.
- iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, & iPad2.
Upon adding these limits, Admob told us:
"You have selected market area or demographic targeting options. As a result, you will receive significantly fewer impressions."
"Okay", I thought, I wanted to slowly dole the advertisements out anyways. We set our ad group's bid around the suggested bid of $0.28 and waited. Hopefully we would come close to the $15 / day budget even though we had added demographic targeting. I clicked "Save", leaned back in my chair and took a sip of my coffee, slightly interested at how many *days* it would take to deplete the budget.
Then something strange happened. I literally switched tabs over to my gmail, and saw an email subject:
"Admob Update: Account Balance Low" (note timestamp at 2:49pm)
I opened the email to find a notification that our budget had fallen below $50. Well, that made sense, since we only started with $50. I realized that meant we had already gotten a click from Admob! Wow, that was fast.
I clicked back to my inbox, and grew confused to find yet another email from Admob, only this time the subject read:
"Admob Update: Account Balance Depleted" (note timestamp at 2:50pm)
Wait, depleted? As in, entirely gone? I was incredulous. I immediately switched back to my Admob account and clicked refresh on the stats panel. Keep in mind this entire process from hitting "save" is happening in less than maybe 100 seconds.
31,836 Impressions
152 Clicks
(In less than 2 minutes!!!)
"WTF??" I honestly didn't know what to think. I guessed maybe there was a mistake with my settings. I went back to the campaign settings panel to check and confirmed that I had set a budget of $15, and I had selected:
"Standard - Show Ads Evenly Throughout the Day"
Throughout the day. Right. I thought I understood what that meant. Maybe I had missed something. I went back to my campaign settings and clicked the help icon next to the ad spend setting in the Admob Campaign Settings page.
Standard - Evenly distribute daily spend
- AdMob tries to spend your budget as evenly as possible. However, we cannot guarantee that we spend your budget evenly over 24 hours.
- Factors such as how targeted your ads are and traffic fluctuations during the day affect the actual spend.
- Smaller budget amounts tend to spend faster.
Ok, some vague clarity: "smaller budget amounts tend to spend faster". Much, much faster.
In some vague psychological attempt to justify my wasted ad spend, I figured that with 152 targeted clicks we might have seen a healthy 5-10% conversion.
I anxiously awaited our AppAnnie (www.appannie.com) email that evening. When it came in, I was again, "surprised" with the Admob effect:
There was no change in downloads. Our application had effectively leveled off after our initial iTunes bump, and we had seen an almost entirely predictable download number for the past 10 days. We turned off all other paid funnels as a control, and our organic funnels were returning little to no traffic for the past 2 weeks. With the 152 admob clicks coming in, we didn't see one download for our $1.99 application.
To Admob's credit, maybe there were some things we could have done better to better tailor our advertisement to target our market.
"Maybe Your Ads Sucked"
We created 5 different advertisements, though with the ~35 character restriction, ad permutations are pretty limited.
"Maybe You didn't find the Right People"
Hmmm, well, we know they had iPhones, we know they were using legit iOS platforms so they likely also had an iTunes account with a Credit Card. Since we also have Facebook connect as a requirement upon signup, we had hundreds of fbook connect data points to use as a benchmark for our targeting.
There's no question platform specific mobile ad targeting is the future. Though if Admob is alienating the smaller publishers like you and me, there still is considerable space for other players to come in and dominate the market.
The next time you're looking to burn $50, you can go buy 5 copies of Cheaper By The Dozen 2 or go ahead and set up a Google Admob Campaign.
P.S. If you want to spend $1.99 and download all your tagged photos and friends' facebook albums, you can also check out our app, Fotobook.
