Does AdMob or iPhone Ads Make You Money? Not In My Test

As some of you know, my company has been actively building out iPhone apps to sell on the iTunes App Store. Some of our apps are big hits and some are not.

Wednesday, we decided to try out AdMob, one of the most popular ad networks for the iPhone. AdMob can place ads within other iPhone apps, to help promote a brand, product or so on. We ran a $100 test to see what type of conversion rate we can get.

We picked the "App Store" from the "adverting goal" screen. The App Store will basically enable you to link the ad directly to your product on the App Store page. So that made most sense for us. The other options allow for linking to a web page, phone number, video (YouTube, I believe), audio (QuickTime), iTunes link, Maps or Canvas (I assume a picture).

So we picked App Store.

Here is the ad creation tool for the App Store. You have a title, description, graphic and app store URL:

Here is a closer look at the ad that showed up in iPhones:

We made sure to include the price of the app, for obvious reasons.

We then targeted only US iPhone users, since the price of 99 cents was most likely only relevant there:

Then we set our bid to 50 cents per click, so we get a lot of traffic in a short period of time:

The results? Well, not so great.

The ad was live for about 30 minutes. It received 26,815 impressions, with 200 clicks resulting in an average CTR of 0.75% with an average CPC of $0.50.

On Thursday, I received the sales numbers for Wednesday's BlackBook sales. They were a disappointing 16 sales. We average about that or more per day for the BlackBook, without the ads. Since we sell the BlackBook for 99 cents, we only make 70 cents per sale. With 16 sales, we made $11.20. $11.20 minus the $100 in ads, turns out to an $88.80 loss on the campaign.

Now, there may be other factors why the campaign stunk. Maybe people in the US did not know what a Little Black Book meant? Maybe they didn't like some of the reviews, cause our competitor left some nasty reviews about our app - which is honestly way superior to our competitor's app. Or maybe AdMob is not a great avenue to advertiser iPhone apps? I am not sure.

I am sharing this because I received a number of Twitters from interested SEMs asking me how the campaign went. So here is your answer, not well!

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

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posted rustybrick in Local Search at November 28, 2008 7:06 AM Comments (11)

Comments

I'm impressed by the number of impressions the ad got in 30 minutes.

I'm thinking that when an iphone user opens an app with one goal in mind then its bad timing to try to take their attention away and sell them something. But the CPC model should help resolve that problem, people shouldn't click if they aren't interested - I wonder how many did out of simple curiosity or confusion/accident.

Thanks for sharing your results.

Posted by TimDineen at November 28, 2008 09:33

My experience with AdMob from a publisher point of view have been short and disappointed as well. Not only broke their JavaScript our iPhone navigation (wpTouch for WordPress by Bravenewcode.com), but the earnings were the lowest of the lowest (1 dollarcent per click) with a fill rate of 90%. I guess this is because we're an European iPhone website (iPhoneclub.nl, approx. 40K visitors per day, 25K unique) and not many advertisers - like My Little Black Book in this story - also target for Europe.

Any publishers with other experiences with either AdMob or Google Adsense on their iPhone-optimized website?

Posted by Jean-Paul Horn at November 28, 2008 10:33

I had 2.8% CTR with 44000 impressions within a hour of doing my application. The next day I was disappointed to see zero difference in my revenue. I can not believe with 2500 opens you get not even 1 conversion. Something is not right here...

Posted by Shekhar at December 20, 2008 12:36

Yesterday we spent $800 for more than 2,300,000 impressions on AdMob to advertise our very popular UniWar game (reached #8 on the AppStore previously).

This resulted in 26,118 click throughs and about ONLY 30 sales. This is about a 0.1% of conversion rate from click to buy.
Needless to say that our ROI was very negative. We spent $800 to make about $90 in gross revenues (before Apple's cut).

Posted by AlexKral at May 1, 2009 14:05

I tried this as well and can report similar results. I spend $100 over two days bidding at the lowest price I could. These were my results:
- Impressions: 422,315
- Clicks: 1,986
- CTR: 0.47%
- Sales: 4 over both days

My sales actually decreased- essentially I believe that ads had no effect though.

Posted by MattjDrake at June 17, 2009 07:32

Same experience here. Paid $100 with a 3% CTR and zero sales. We sell iPhone replacement batteries.

Posted by Marty Goehner at August 17, 2009 23:32

Guys, I can't BELIEVE some of your posts! You are not seeing profit from using admobs because you guys are spending $100 on a campaign to sell a product that costs $0.99!!! That is insane! So at $0.50 a click and spending $100, you already knew you were only going to get 200 clicks right? Let's say your campaign had an "out of this world" conversion of clicks to sales at 40%. That would be 80 sales and that is great and unheard of but your product only costs $0.99 so you will have only made $79.20. So does it make sense to promote a product that costs $0.99 using a $100 campaign where you already know you are going to get 200 clicks?? Absolutely not! You've gotta be smarter than your business or you'll get wiped out. I spent $100 over two days, received over 3,000 clicks with only 5 sales. But I get $44 per sale so that is $44 x 5= $220. Doesn't that make so much more sense guys?

Posted by Dave at August 27, 2009 15:23

Ya I agree with the guy above me, this article is ridiculous and the way you are promoting it through admob is filled with error. I cant say much because most has already been said but you should try again with a more expensive product.

Speaking of which I am doing a 60$ test campaign right now with admob and a 24$ per sale item, I also get money per month on every sale I get so it adds up. I set the bid to the lowest amount so I can get the most bang for my bucks starting out. I will tell you all how it goes.

Posted by Joshua at September 8, 2009 14:29

Are you guys serious? Sometimes I wonder why people try to market when they obviously have little clue. I reach those numbers with less impressions and fare less cost. Tsk tsk on your marketing guy.

Posted by Norman at September 13, 2009 17:08

admob sucks

Posted by jackd at November 13, 2009 16:50

just look at their name ad mob, yes admob.com sucks

Does AdMob or iPhone Ads Make You Money? Not In My Test

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