Frustrating

This is frustrating.

Over the last month, I have improved my games with new versions, done a tiny bit of advertising, and otherwise worked on getting installs up. I was successful, growing my active installs by almost 100%.

Accordingly, my Impressions shot up by almost 150%. Better games and more active installs. This is great! Right?

Nope, simultaneous to the spike in Impressions, my eCPM dropped by almost half, making my income only slightly above where it was.

Why? Because my click through rate dropped by 50% at the same time. Apparently, people who are playing the games more are less likely to follow the ads, either because of indifference or better hand eye coordination.

So, lesson learned, twice the Impressions does not mean twice the revenue. If it had, the money I spent on advertising would have paid for itself. But, alas, it didn’t.

regards

Seed, are you using AdMob or different ad network? I’ve notice just not so recently that there are different values given on different AdMob’s screens, that is… on the main screen the fill rate is almost more than 90% but when you take a closer look at geostats values show less than or approximately 50%. Have you notice that as well?

Yes - admob.

I hadn’t noticed that, but I just checked and you are right. Sites&Apps reports a fill rate of 98%+, but Geo Stats looks like about 50% of that. Requests seem to line up, but Impressions are not in sync for some reason.

Just figured this out.

I am guessing that the difference between the Sites/Apps fill rate and the GeoStats fill rate is because of Google ad fills. The former is probably reporting a fill rate with both admob and google ads. The later is probably not counting the Google fills.

You mean Google’s AdSense? Hmm… it’s quite possible, I didn’t thought of that before.
And have you tried with different ad network? Maybe you’ll get better numbers with Millennial, Airpush or Madvertise? Maybe it’s time to give it a go?

I really haven’t even thought about changing networks. I have a good click through rate and a good eCPM even after the dip.

The other thing is that the time I spend tinkering with other networks, playing with integrating SDKs and toying with different ways of presenting my ads could be spent making new games or old games better.

In my mind, my lack of significant numbers of downloads is the most important thing that I need to improve - somehow - and will have the greatest impact. Eeking a few more cents out of my insignificant number of customers is not where I am focusing.

Just my two cents, although I am probably wrong.

Regards

Not at all… Actually wisely said :wink:

Well said. That’s the same reason why I’m still using AdMob on most of my apps. If it’s only a matter of a few dollars a month, the time is probably better spent improving or developing new apps.