Admob - General Decline CPM/Impressions

Hey guys,

I’ve been following the discussions on this board since the beginning and its one of my favourite android/mobile monetization resources.

Short story about me:
Nearly a year ago I started releasing ad supported (admob banner) android apps. I didn’t take it very serious in the beginning and it was nice to make a few dollars each month without much work.

That was until September 2011. Then my income exploded from 200$ a month to 2k, up to 13k in Dec. Which was kinda nice :smiley:

Here’s the catch: Since Feb 2012 I see a very steep decline in requests, downloads, cpm and consequently income. My income dropped down to ~3500$ for the last 30 days (still falling).

I guess my question is if I am the only one who’s experiencing this and/or if this common for this time of the year (post winter/xmas).

Waiting for you experiences, suggestions and input :slight_smile:

February 2012 and March 2012 were really good times in admob. I got more than $2 eCPM. April 2012 is where everyone got a huge decline in revenue (to $1 eCPM in my case). So I suppose you should check your games/apps - maybe there are some problems or you got some bad reviews? You should also update them, make more levels, add some new functions etc. - and make new apps, games.

Great income by the way. Thanks for sharing. I hope I’ll get sth like that one day. :slight_smile:

Could you share some tips how did you get to have such revenue? How did you market your apps/games, what type of apps that were, what app stores did you submit your apps etc.?

Wow yeah, any kind of information you could give us would be great! Not to copy anything of course, you don’t have to show screenshots or anything, just general tips like Magnesus mentioned would be appreciated! :stuck_out_tongue:

I’d echo what Magnesus and kiwicoco said - would be great to hear some more details! Congratulations on your success so far, that’s great results you’ve been getting.

This year I’ve also had a great decline in ad revenues compared with the end of 2011. Some of this can be attributed to the fact that I haven’t done a lot of work on updates & the like. But I think the ad networks are also struggling with inventory. Actually, Madvertise have said this officially.

madvertise has only a bunch of ads available at the moment … I cannot believe that this will gather any good CTR when users only see the same ad over and over again … will surely drop it when I update some of my apps next time; better to send the traffic to admob (and don’t care about strugling around with german tax laws … annoying for me)

Thanks for you replies guys :slight_smile:

@reviews: actually the reviews are getting better since I integrated an AppRater dialog into my apps.

@updates: I try to update my apps every 1-2 months. Maybe I should change that to a shorter interval.

I don’t really have time for a long post (maybe another time) but here is a quick summary of things I learned:

Marketing:
None.
I tried house ads but that didn’t really make a difference.

Ads:

  • admob banners for apps with a high (2000-6000 downloads per day) downloadcount
  • leadbolt notifications ads for apps with fewer downloads
  • mobclix banners: started using them in one of my apps (US only app) a few weeks ago. eCPM was really low (0.32$) while the app had a low download rate (few hundred downloads a day) but it went up to 2$ when the downloads per day went up (4000 downloads per day now).

Market:

  • Play Store: still the biggest one
  • Amazon: mostly worthless for me unless one of my apps enters their charts (then better than the play store)
  • SamsungApps: Had really good download counts there up until end of march (then they forced their users to register even for free apps and download counts dropped to 30%)
  • AppStoreConnect: quite big chinese android market with good download numbers
  • SlideMe and GetJar: few hundred downloads a day

I know my response is quite short, but I’d be happy to answer more questions.

PS: Has anyone else any experience with mobclix?

That information is enough for me, thank you. :slight_smile:

Yes. I got sick of them changing their numbers all the time. Their excuse is they don’t control the numbers, the advertising companies they get the adverts from do. But I have seen some advertisers go from thousands of adverts served with decent eCPM and then get ‘revised’ 2 months later to ZERO adverts served and ZERO dollars. I too would like to spend money on my credit card and then later modify the figures to say I don’t owe anything!

So I moved to Mopub. I am much happier. eCPM might be ‘lower’… but at least it is a true figure (mostly… some duplicate clicks, but that is normal!). Better than seeing my eCPM suddenly halve before they need to pay me.

Of course, even though I have stopped using Mobclix, it will be several months before they actually pay me the several hundred they owe me. 90days net sucks…

wher to buy fresh google play account ?