push based cross-app promotion

Hi,

I learned some people use their own push system for advertising purposes. It has a key benefit - does not canibalize the income from real ads being served. Also - it allows for better control on what happens.

On the negative side - you need to get a solid privacy policy for your system, make sure its legal (both legal in terms of law and Google Policies) and have some infrastructure behind.

The ideal system I have in my mind would allow for the following:
[ul]
[li] App will query the system to see if a notification shall be sent every now and then - but not to often.
[/li][li] It will track what was shown on the device not to incidentally show a notification more than once.
[/li][li] Clicks will be tracked on the server side.
[/li][li] Devices can be identified by the app running and possibly some more data (I was thinking on assigning each device a random ID from 1 to 10 to allow testing an ad on just 10% of the whole population of my users).
[/li][/ul]

Now - any comments on such approach and more importantly - any system you are aware that delivers such functionality?

Thanks for any help provided … right now I use Admob House Ads from time to time and buttons in free app that advertises the full version, and my next step is to do cross app promotion using buttons or other in-game content.

[quote=“belunch”]
[li] Devices can be identified by the app running and possibly some more data (I was thinking on assigning each device a random ID from 1 to 10 to allow testing an ad on just 10% of the whole population of my users).[/li][/quote]

Better generate large random number for every device (at least 1 to 100). Then, if you want to target for example 35% instead of 10% of the population just use: if( ID%100<=35).

Thanks for feedback. Right now - not even a single line of code has been written yet. For sure your suggestion makes perfect sense - and my idea is to have an option to execute the campaign later for the remaining user base (or keep on issuing the notification 1% by 1%). Also - to be frank - I am worried this will not get out of the “idea phase” as my dev hours continue to shrink :frowning:

I did something similar for my Fake iPhone 4S app. Set an AsyncTask to run on launch, which queried my server with an App ID and version number, to check if there was a message to display. The server response included a flag indicating whether the message should be shown on every launch, or just once. Then I simply set a SharedPreference to indicate whether a particular message ID had been shown already.

This worked fine - except the app got popular, and the server started getting several requests per second, 24/7. Thankfully my hosting was able to handle it - but this is something to be aware of when launching anything that could potentially be used by a lot of people at once. And when the U.S. is awake, you can expect at least 2-3x average traffic :slight_smile: