Android income experiment - or why AdMob sucks | Hacker News Reader

Android income experiment - or why AdMob sucks

fanitis.com

29 pointswhalabi24 comments

Before I continue, I'll say I'm not a supporter of admob. I don't think ads belong on mobile phones the same way they do on the internet.

But your experience is hardly revealing. 300 ad impressions is practically nothing. Standard clickthrough rates are 1% or less, and probably even less on mobile ads, so it's not a surprise that you didn't get a single click.

The smallest unit when purchasing ad impressions is 1,000. If you can't make the smallest unit, you shouldn't expect to make much money either.

CTR on mobile ads averages around 1%. So you're spot on :)

Lots of problems here. First, his apps are Live Wallpapers, and he only shows ads on the preferences screen. Second, his sample is only ~500 installs and 600 impressions!

AdMob isn't killing it for me, but is a lot better than the OP portends. Here's my stats so far today:

http://i.imgur.com/CNJb1.png

FWIW: 25k installs, ~38% active, 1.7 MM impressions to date (2 months).

Agreed, small sample. However ads on the preferences screen of live wallpapers is common practise. Don't see why the results can't be extrapolated unless amount of requests effects inventory served. I'm new to ads - is this true?

First, in this case, sample is so small that noise dominates.

On your main questions, yes, established apps with known average-beating clickthrough and (where possible) targeted demographics are matched to higher-paying-per-click lower-volume advertisers.

This is done to optimize total revenue through the network, and to avoid showing all the impressions of a high-paying advertiser on a junky "back page" that has low CTR and low spend.

Now, if you are a "brand" advertiser who values impressions and not clicks, you might be happy on the free back page.

For me AdMob performs slightly better than iAd. This is on an iPhone game that uses AdWhirl, so AdMob is actually getting the leftovers from iAd.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/117000/hackernews/admob.png

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/117000/hackernews/iad.png

This is interesting because I've got the reverse! My CTR on AdMob is far, far lower.

Holy crap, what is your secret?

I average 15K impressions a day on one of our games, and get maybe 30 clicks, and make around a buck.

You get ~2K impressions and close to 115 clicks and make ~$5-$10

If I could get your numbers I'd be making a killing.

Note: I use AdMob for my NASCAR Countdown iPhone app. So my experience is with iOS not Android (yet).

First off, his ad placement isn't very good. It needs to be in a visible, but not intrusive spot. A preference screen isn't going to be visited much.

A fill rate of 28% is incredible. If I had that fill rate I'd be making actual money with my app instead of the $50 or so a month. AdMob adjusts your fill rate to control costs, it starts out high and drops as their system adjusts for click through and whatever else they throw into the equation.

My app's single ad on the main page gets between 2k-9k requests a day (it varies as you get closer to a race). The fill rate has been 0.54% to 3.7% in the last few weeks, translating into 1-10 clicks a day.

I'm surprised you're getting such low fill rates on AdMob. In my HackerNews Padreader app, I'm using iAd, with AdMob to fill in because the fill rates are so much higher (but lower payout). Did you change any of the default ad settings? Certain ad dimensions also have a higher fill than others.

Some additional info:

iAd gives me a 20-70% fill rate (currently 50% for last 7 days)

AdMob gives me a 90%+ fill rate fairly consistently

your fill rates cant be accurate - admob fill rates should average about 70-90% (I run an app with admod and have an average fill rate of 84%). are you sure you're not talking about CTR? Or maybe your language or category filters are too restrictive. Admob is one of the largest advertisers, they should be able to fill most of your requests.

No, that's what I'm seeing. I had 'age appropriate ads' turned off but every other category and language enabled. I'll switch that one on and see what happens in the next week.

I had a similar experience. I wrote an app that helped parents choose a name while my wife and I were expecting. I thought I'd see how admob performed, so I put some unobtrusive ads in.

You might expect with the keywords that I was sending, oh I don't know, ads somehow relating to parenting? When you're a new parent you have to buy a ton of new things. What could be better for advertisers?

Not a single ad in the app's entire existence ever targeted anything to do with the app's audience. The most common ad that I saw was for gamers. Trying to enable local ads didn't help either, the same ad displayed over and over again for a spa -- over 200 miles away.

Needless to say, the advertising barely paid for the coffee that I drank while developing that app...

AdMob doesnt work for such few installs. I have an app with 900 active installs which averages 600 impressions per day with 1%CTR. That makes only 30cents the best days...

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.devartis.games.mem...

In the "be careful what you wish for" files, the glut of mobile inventory is about to bring a scourge of affiliate / direct response driven solutions.

In the world of TV & Radio the "remnant", or unfilled inventory, has shifted in the last 10 years to performance advertising / per inquiry.

Fantastic stuff like payday lending, marginally legal insurance schemes, weight loss pills, etc have all gotten major traction due to an over abundance of ad inventory.

I'm mentioning this because with the excess of unsold mobile inventory app makers are looking for solutions, and affiliate marketers and direct response guys are going to start coming on strong.

At Affiliate Summit last weekend this was the topic du jour.

Reminded me of the last go around when the affiliate marketing world was fired up about the new "advertorial" format.

Hold on to your crash helmets, I predict ugliness ahead.

It also sucks for advertisers. At least for my click to call campaign - it blew through about $500 (very cheap CPC too) in 10 mins and literally every call was a misclick - not 1 single good call.

That's a big problem with mobile ads. App developers need to make sure they place them away from buttons and OS elements to minimize stray clicks.

Or just use pay-per-view not pay-per-click model in mobile advertising http://blog.adduplex.com/2011/08/pay-per-view-vs-pay-per-cli...

Not sure how that would solve the problem unless the CPM is like $0.0001. Maybe they should do click to call tracking and set minimum call lengths to be billed - although that might mean AdMob doesn't make any $ b/c it's all mistakes/fraud.

With PPV you would've paid for impressions and, if these didn't result in any return, you'd know that it's not because of fraud/accidental clicks.

@ailon - That still doesn't solve my problem because IT IS all fraud/misclicks. So unless the CPM is insanely low it still won't register any good calls. The only thing I can see mobile ads working for, as they currently are, is for downloading other apps. Mobile->real world doesn't seem to be working in my experience and some other people I've talked with.

In PPV no one can defraud you with fake clicks. You are not paying for clicks. And generating thousands of impressions for fraud purposes is less trivial task than just a few clicks here and there.

I 100% get what you're saying and see there is less risk - however, I'm just not buying mobile will work for online->offline phone calls after our massive failures (yes - we tried more than once). Are there any case studies out there of mobile campaigns bringing in real calls?

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