Getting Publicity for Apps
Tonight I saw a really good ReTweet from @SnappyTouch (be sure to follow him for interesting articles/blogs on iPhone development) on a blog article that another iPhone dev @fingerbakery wrote today regarding purchasing a small ad buy from Admob to promote his new app Pokerbot (also going to download it to help a brother out, so @fingerbakery if you read this article, take one away from your total as I bought it independently from the ad).
You can click the article for more in depth information, but summarizing some of the key points:
1) He only spent $50
2) He paid $0.04/click and garnered appx 1250 clicks
3) He has a tip to mention the price in the ad to try to AVOID people clicking the ad; kind of counter intuitive, but the point being that you only want people clicking if they are willing to spend the money.
4) $50 bought him a campaign that ran for 4 hours
Tomorrow he will posting how many downloads that he got and attributing them to his advertising campaign. I will be interested in seeing a couple of things: (i) if the downloads covered the advertising cost (he will need roughly 70 downloads), (ii) if he thinks it was a good enough idea to try again, and (iii) if he tries a different time frame to run the ad and the results from that experiment.
I will be paying attention to his blog post closely tomorrow to determine if this is a strategy that I should employ for BarCards (the $0.99 version) as well as BarCards Lite (the free version) and to track how closely a “click” ties to a “download” in both of the examples. It might be equally interesting to change the BarCards price to the original price of $1.99 to see if the “click to download” ratio changes.
Very cool that you can stand up an ad campaign on Admob this easy. Might have to try it out.
Thanks for the links! One thing I want to stress is that I really doubt that I’ll make the money back. I probably didn’t make this clear enough in the post, but a lot of the reason for me buying these ads is experimentation, my own curiosity, and to see if the increased sales from the ads helps my search ranking in the App Store, and my ranking in the directory.
I do think this will wind up being an experiment that loses me money, especially in the short-term (then a bit less in the longterm if my visibility increases), but I don’t mind throwing some of my profits from the app into a little experiment.
You also bring up one thing that may throw off the numbers for me: If people buy the app because of my blog post, that’ll throw off my results. I think a lot of the clicks on my blog came after midnight though maybe, hmm.
Andrew,
Thanks for replying; one thing that you should know is that the App Store stops tracking downloads at Midnight PST for American downloads. You might have to tease out some downloads from other sources.
Also, in the limited time that I have played the game, it seems like a lot of fun. I will note that it was a little confusing for me to make/raise my bets, but I think I have it figured out. There also might be a bug because when I drag the bar all the way to the left, I will get different numbers for a minimum bet.
Awesome job though man and a great idea; I wish I had the coding skills of folks like you!
Best of luck with the app and keep the blog going!
garrett