My first month / admob report page 2

Hi Guys!

I’ve started Android Development with Nov '11. That’s a little bit late to jump on the train (i think) and things seem to be much harder than they were 12 months ago …

Currently I have 4 Games in the Market (and on other sites). My latest one (Minesweeper: Unlimited!) is pretty good and I get really good feedback about it.

But to be honest: How shall a developer today do to promote his app/game? I was always better in developing than in marketing. Downloads are very low … exceept the Minesweeper one, which has good downloads at slidem.org (nearly 1500 for today) has only 70 on Android Market.

That is mainly because slideme has an “just-in” section … android dropped that some time ago … that’s really horrible for new developers - for me it looks like to not have even a chance get some light on my app …

Mi first game (Tablet Tower Defense) was sold 3 times (in market), whereas Minesweeper was sold 1 time (in slideme). I have demo versions with limited playtime but no advertise (would be ridicolous with so low downloads).

So my total income of Dez was about - let me calculate - 2$ ? :slight_smile:

It’s not so bad for me because I had some time and I really like developing games and would love to do that for a reasonable income - but currently I don’t see much light at the end of the tunnel :slight_smile:

I have great ideas for good games but they all need much time which I had too invest first - and currently I am not very confident, that they will pay that time out again.

So let me ask some more expierenced androidians out there: What do you do to make your app popular? Maybe I missed something important or maybe I am just not patient enough and have to wait some months keeping updating my games.

I’m much of an amateur, but as far as user experience goes, I have to say it’s all about the graphic that makes the app standout.

Especially for game, glossy 2D side scroll game found its haven in the App Market, as gamer you should know that yourself, would you rather play the first Elder Scroll game with Skyrim graphic or play Skyrim with the first Elder Scroll graphic ?

I believe that gamer judge a book by its cover these days, you should get something beautiful to show in order to attract attention.

Thanks for your reply.

Graphics is not my problem, from many of the players I got very positive feedback about the game itself and the graphics - they like it.

The problem is more: There is not enough attention to my games, they were not found … I can see clearly the difference between slideme (got “just in” section) and android market (no such section) - in slideme I have 1000 times more downloads.

So how to proper made a game popular in android market? You see, I am not a company like “Gamehouse” who can afford to blow thousands of euros into marketing and have a big customer base which I can inform with newsletters about a new game.

The point however is: How can a little Indy Developer survive in the market nowadays?

I believe that for indie developer, making the name for your game is a continuous progress, from early conception to after GOLD release you always bring news about your game to the community, it is true that a small indie developer can’t land a big buzz easily without gorgeous review. For mobile game, especially on Android Market, the experience varies, different phone give you different bugs.

I have been working as a game tester for Gameloft for 6 months, it is such a painful experience to see how 1 single games can give above 3000+ bugs, but for iOS it only give around 400 bugs at most. Android is definitely a danger zone for game quality, it varies too greatly, either the quality has to be very consistent or it offers an addictive freemium scheme.

My intention is not to get rich by selling a game :slight_smile: But it should be an income of any kind, even it is fun for me to make games … I cannot eat fun and pay my bills with it … :slight_smile:

It’s kinda interessting, that android is a better market for games - I think this is mainly because of younger users … they often do not have the money or the will to spend the to high price for an iPhone … maybe it’s also because younger ppl are more informed about the possibilities of android and the “freeness” to do what you want on your phone :wink:

currently i have about 3000 downloads for my best 2 games overall in a period of about 1.5 months … I dont know if that is a good number.

I also applied for appia … because i’ve read about it … but this is still pending since over 1 month, so I dont think, they are still alive …

What’s the name of your games ?

Maybe if we play it we can see the problem that doesn’t make the game shine, therefore giving much better feedback to you

Never too late! It’s true that the Android world is very different to what it was 12 months ago. But there are also a lot more resources out there now to help developers build great apps, so in some ways it’s also easier these days. Especially with Google just releasing a design guide for Android developers, it’s still a really exciting ecosystem to be part of :slight_smile:

There are many ways you can promote your app without paying for advertisements. One popular method is posting on forums (such as this one!), to spread the word. Sometimes one forum post can get you some great feedback, and spread your app even further by word of mouth.

Now that the Just In section is gone from the Android Market, it’s much more focused on getting featured. If you’ve got some money to spend on advertising, it’s possible to propel your app to the top of the charts & build more organic downloads this way. But if you’re not looking at running paid advertisements, it’s really hard to get your app noticed without picking a frequently-searched title, or getting hand-picked by Google as a featured app.

AppBrain can be a helpful resource. I’ve had my apps featured in the AppBrain “Top 10 Hottest Apps” list a few times before, and this has worked wonders for my download rates. Because AppBrain is a smaller marketplace than the official Android Market, it doesn’t take as many downloads to get you in the top 10 list. The only trick is, you have to refer people to the AppBrain website instead of market.android.com, and they have to install your app through the AppBrain client in order to be counted.

There’s also good old SEO. Apparently the latest Market redesign introduced new ranking factors, including how many web links point to your Market listing. So getting your app reviewed on several Android sites could help build links as well as audience.

Time for some updates :slight_smile:

Maybe some of you are watching any news on my website (reiti.net) and so far had heard from my latest game:

Robo Miner.

This game now was completely different than my games before. Maybe because it’s simply a good game. I spread the word over in some forums and tried to do some more “publishing”

I am sure that will not work every game, my method does work, because the game is funny. Because I am not a friend of “marketing methods” that involve sending friends to a link or something like that, I am simply not able to do so. It is even hard for me to send tons of mails to blog writers and asking for a review - it’s not my kind of doing, it’s hard for me, because I have the feeling to annoy them :slight_smile:

Robo Miner is out for over 2 weeks now and performs really good. There are already reviews out there, i got over 15k downloads and the game generates ~500-1000 clicks a day (~50k impressions) … eCPM and CTR are very low at the moment but the game gathered an ad revenue of ~500$ until now.

Maybe I put up an income report at the end of the month - beside the factor, that Robo Miner is making profits: I am very happy to have a game which people like - for me that’s important, I wanna make cool software :slight_smile:

Sales are still very low - and because it is so difficult to maintain that much stores I switched all my demos to free and put advertisement in it.

Most of them perform poorly at the moment - except Tablet Tower Defense, which is reaching 1k downloads (but fillrate is bad atm, just started some days ago)

So well - after this happy journey with Robo Miner - yes, the market still works. Robo Miner Downloads in market are currently much higher than on slideme (where they count update downloads TOO) - so when doing the right “marketing” android market is a good resource.

I could write so much more, but will end here atm - anyone interested can visit my website, I’ll post any infos there :wink:

greetings!

PS: just saw, that I haven’t posted something about Robo Miner here yet … what a miss :slight_smile:

Nice to read about your success with Robo Miner! From 2$/month in december up to 500$/twoWeeks is really cool! Keep up the good work!

Yes, that is really cheering me up - so I just have to ignore the one or other bad comment at android market (some really dumb ppl out there) and can proceed to build more games and improve existing ones.

I have to admit I need to watch my numbers every 30 minutes - because I am not a patient nature … I am highly curious how this will proceed - currently it is steadily trending up … hard to believe that it will stay trending up … hmm :slight_smile:

The 500$ are from AdMob ads or something else? Impressive job, dude! Congrats!

Yes, that is admob alone - I have madvertise (mixed with admob) in some other published games, but there is just 1% fillrate … no click so far

I havent mixed madvertise in robo miner because the ad-sizes differ from admob (they scale different) … normaly that would be good, because admob does not fill the screen width in landscape mode - with robo miner, it would overlap the controls when filled, also I havent found any way of getting different sized ads in respect of screen size (with admob that works) and I do not have the time to rewrite the madvertise api for that.

The only problem with admob is the eCPM … it is really bad.

Yesterday I got 60k impressions, regular CTR of ~1.5% … BUT eCPM <0.5 … that’s really annoying but there is nothing I can do about it, can I? (1000 clicks yesterday, <30$ … )

edit: just recognizes, that exactly 7 days ago, there was a similar drop in eCPM … strange … it keeps droping

edit: its also very nice to see, how Robo Miner brings also more traffic to my other games, so Minesweeper: Unlimited! currently starts trending up

one day later:

yesterday was an increase in CTR - it was nearly 2% - but eCPM stays at 0.49 … so not that much money for 70k impressions/day :frowning:

maybe that’s also because of the recent popularity of Robo Miner in eastern europe and russia - cheap ads :slight_smile:

another day later:
eCPM raised slightly to 0.53, at a CTR of 2.00 - 90k impressions

the day after:
reached 118k impressions - CTR of 1.85 and an eCPM of 0.43… so eCPM keeps falling drastically. (2.1k clicks could be worth so much more …)

Curious, have you tried to throw in any admob house ads to increase the cross promotion affect?

Yes, I deliver house ads (of Robo Miner) to every other app at the moment to grab as most oft the momentum as possible.

The clickrate of the houseads is 3-4 times better then the one on the real ads, so it works well I think.

Robo Miner is not showing house ads - I think the other games have other source, unfortunately I cannot track where clicks on the market came from sad but I think many of them are issued by “other apps from reiti.net” on the robo miner site

When Robo starts to lose momentum I will publish a new high quality game (hopefully) … working on an small RTS (to be honest, I have to of them in development) and can use Robo as some sort of catapult to make the new app popular - let’s see. I am not very happy with eCPM atm and madvertise has fillrate of under 1% (yes, still)

the next day (yesterday)

I set the maximum refresh rate in admob (120 sec) during this day - seems to have worked.

eCPM was at 0.49, CTR at 1.99 resulting in ~2k clicks - have to watch that further.

monday generally has lowest impressions during a week

Hey man,

I noticed that you are not including any keywords in your app descriptions, specifically for your minesweeper game. I think if you add a list of the names of games that are popular and similar to your game at the end of your description on the Market, you will start to see downloads almost immediately. Same with shapr, which could do very well I think. Not that this will compare to how well your robo miner game is doing, but I bet you can get a few hundred downloads a day for each of these games from the Android Market just by adding keywords at the end of your description.

Regards

Thanks for the hint - I will try that out … for Shapr … … I am missing enough creativity to get keywords … lol :slight_smile:

argl … market is errornous at the moment … :slight_smile: will update later

another day (21. feb) - this day admob changed something in counting impressions - so it seems that adsense impressions are now counted late also. at exactly 16:30 (GMT+0) these are added to the stats.

The lowered refresh rate has resulted in a little less impressions (97k) and a CTR of 2.14 - eCPM raised up to 0.56 not quite bad and I hope this trend will proceed

I also added some more keywords to some of my apps - don’t know if I’ve done it well … but wil see if that makes some difference :slight_smile:

exactly at 16:30 (GMT+0) the stats from yesterday (22.feb) are completed.

ended up with 103k impressions, a CTR of 2.22% and an eCPM of 0.62 - looks pretty promising :slight_smile:

also I got a rejection from samsung apps … xD but no prob they only mentioned some things I would improve anyway :slight_smile: