Payed promotion (conclusion)

After a few days running the $0.02 AdMob campaign for GPS, find me! I terminate my budget. 

My first impression is good and I am very satisfied because for only $45.06 I got 259,194 impressions and 4,172 clicks, which is much more than what I could get by sending messages to forums or paying for a review.

I am not so naive as to think that all clicks were done on purpose as there is certainly a large percentage of unwanted clicks and clicks made ​​for the sole purpose of supporting the application that shows the add.

But the effect on the download is visible as you can see from the graph below:

A marks the day when I begun the $0.01 campaign and B the day when I started the $0.02 campaign. The little increase of downloads in the period AB could be a simply statistic fluctuation, but after B there is a real increment. In just five days I got 68 installs!

Now that the campaign is over I want to see if these 68 new installs would generate more downloads via the mechanism of the "tell to a friend".

Next week an update.

Payed promotion (update)

Yesterday I setup a new AdMob campaign for GPS, find me! with the bid set to $0.02 and the result confirmed my theory: if you set the bid to its default minimal value you will not get many impressions because you have to compete with too many developers.

Rising my bid just by one cent (someone would say that I doubled it) I got much more impressions and clicks than before.

Here are some figures to understand better the difference on a 24 hours statistic:

Bid	Impressions	Clicks	CTR
$0.01	5,566	75	1.35%
$0.02	78,712	1,384	1.76%

since my campaign was approved just 15 hours ago the values you see are extrapolated from the actual trend.

As you can see the difference is very big!

What about the conversion rate? Well, with the $0.01 bid it was hard to tell, but with this new campaign it is immediately recognizable a peak in the downloads. In less than 20 hours I triplicated the daily install average from USA passing from 10 to 30.

It is early to make a reliable statistics, I'll come in the next days with more data.

Payed promotion

Exactly one week ago I create a campaign on AdMob to promote my Application GPS, find me!. Also if it is too early to talk about it I would like to give a short feedback about this experience.

Initially I was a bit skeptical about AdMob because in this blog the author relates that he setup a $50 campaign and in just a few minutes he burn all his budget for only 152 clicks and no one turned into installation.

Reading more carefully I saw that he did two big mistakes:

• his bid was too high ($0.28)
• he advertised a payed app

The bid is what you are willing to pay for each click.

Since my bid will be much lower and my app is free and revolutionary I decided to give a try investing $50.

I set as bid $0.01 which is the minimum allowed and I setup the campaign only for USA. After one week I had 39,000 impressions, about 500 clicks and I payed just $3.68.

Since the beginning of this campaign I got 17 new users from USA, but it is too early to say if this is a consequence of the campaign or a simple statistical fluctuation.

I do not know how AdMob works, but I suppose that the ads are shown with a round robin with priority schema where the priority is set by the bid; the higher the bid the more likely your add will be shown.

I suppose that the minimum bid is chosen by almost all the small developers like me. If I'm right, this class of priority will be the most populated and this explains why I do not get much impressions per day.

Now I setup another campaign identical to the previous but with the bid set to $0.02, let's see if something changes.