Hey everyone - advertiser here!

Hey There

My name is Attila, I am an advertiser that works with Admob (Google) exclusively, my agency spends $xxx,xxx per month on advertising at Admob.

I stumbled upon this forum by pure chance, looks very interesting - am really interested in hearing stories from the “other side”.

If you have any questions about what’s it like from an advertiser standpoint, feel free to hit me up.

Hello and welcome to the forum!

I have a few questions:
What producttypes are you advertising, and whats your general experience? Is it worth it’s money?

We are an agency and we provide performance marketing - pay per install for developers. We have vast experience in getting our advertisers real installs by real people and do major volume.
For example on clean master we do around 40,000 app installs per day.

Do you have any information about the recent decrease in click rates, cpms and downloads that people on the forum are reporting?

Google updated their developer policy on March 30th. In the developer policy they added a clause which puts full responsibility on app developers to ensure full compliance with their new policy.
This sent a ripple effect in the advertising world, where most stopped their advertising campaigns - by doing so, agencies like ours had to stop buying advertising.

That is why you are seeing low CPMs. As far as the click rates go, we are experiencing horrible CTR and horrible click rates as well on our end. CTR average is usually 0.9-1.3% on a month level average, now we’re seeing 0.3% averages last few days, volume is very low for clicks as well coming in through our advertisements placed in apps. So I am wondering myself, does this have to do with their recent policy update as well? Or people just stopped using their phones? (Hehe, the latter is very unlikely!)

Hi and welcome to the forums,

I have a question regarding Admob’s price per click that you can read here: Admob cost per click - who can explain this?

Basically, the question is this: why am I getting only 2-3 cents per click from USA and UK in one game and at least 6 cents per click from the same countries in another game?

The answer is economics 101 - supply and demand.

Your game A where you get only 2-3 cents a click might have just 1 or 2 advertisers who have selected to place their ads on that game.
Your game B where you get 6 cents from click you might have more advertisers, and more advertisers drives the price up.

Lets say we run an ad in game A, and it does horrible - we don’t make sales from that game - but for some reason when we run that ad in game B, we make a lot of sales (maybe demographic of game B is different/better suited for our offer/product) - so we will place a very high bid on Game B because we know that its worth it for us, so if competition comes, the price per click will go up until our maximum CPC we’re willing to pay.

Hope that answers your Q :slight_smile:

What you’re saying makes sense. However, the games are not that different. Both games are puzzle games (even though the first one was initially posted in the Board category).

As far as I know, there is no option as an advertiser to choose what game you want to advertise in, the Admob script optimizes the impressions delivered itself. If this is correct, then how would the script know where to send the traffic if Game 1 was released only 2 days before the initial post? Doesn’t it need more time to gather data?

I got the feeling the more impressions a game delivers, the better eCPM it gets. And that would make sense, because more impressions possibly means the game is more popular and therefore better (i know sometimes more popular does not mean better, but in average i think it does) and that would be a more valuable place to advertise on.

You are wrong, we can specify exactly what app we want to advertise in. It’s called targeting.

Why game B is better than Game A, you will never know - so many variables can come into play that it just becomes an over complicated math problem.

The value of the space in a game depends on what demographic uses the game. If the game is used by toddlers, it can be the most popular game among toddlers but chances of it making a lot of money are slim to none since toddlers won’t click ads, and in turn buy the products/services being sold.

However, if the game attracts for example’s sake people from the Hamptons, who got disposable income in the millions and the advertisers flash some cool new Roger Dubuis watch, advertisers will pay a premium to advertise there because they know the demographic that most likely will buy their watch is right there!

How do you feel about developers releasing apps on different markets? I opened a thread in this forum a while ago saying that I think it’s a bad idea to release the game on other markets.

I usually release my games on the SlideMe market prior to releasing on Google Play because I want to test my games for a week or two before going live on Google Play. However, I am thinking that is not a smart thing to do and will affect the income. Here is the explanation: users with SlideMe don’t usually have Google Play and are from countries where advertisers don’t spend so much. That means ads will be delivered but income will be low. Conversion rates won’t be tracked by Admob (meaning all the clicks on banners with a Google Play destination won’t result in any installs) so the script will realize that delivering such ads to users won’t be good. So, by the time I release the game on Google Play, my game will already have a “red flag” on it and Admob won’t deliver good ads when I finally release on GP. What are your thoughts on this?

Google Play is the grand daddy, where most of the traffic is. You will limit yourself and exposure to your app by not going where the volume of visitors are. And that is google play.

I’d love to build websites, and not rely on google, just SEO them and get traffic from Yahoo or Bing, but the reality is - if I wan’t my website to succeed, it must be ranking high on Google, because that’s where the traffic is.

I don’t think you understand what I am saying. :slight_smile:

I am not saying I am not going live on Google Play. I am saying that before I go live on GP, I first go live on other markets to allow 1-2 weeks of testing. My question is if that’s a good decision or I should ONLY go live on GP, no other markets like SlideMe for example.

Please read my post again. :slight_smile:

Sorry about that, well, I honestly don’t know. I know much about advertising and getting app installs but not about ways and places of testing new apps. In fact I know like nothing about making an app for android. I only know how to sell it so people use an app :slight_smile:

I was explaining what I think happens and I wanted to know your thoughts from an advertiser point of view who knows better than me how Admob works.

Let me say this another way: if I publish a game on an alternative market and eCPM from Admob is very low, will that affect future revenues when actually going live on Google Play? Will Admob flag my app as a “low paying app” and deliver cheaper ads when going live on GP?

I hope this is easier to answer from an advertiser corner. :slight_smile:

Thanks!

In your opinion, what is the best way to promote a new high quality game with a limited budget of $1000?

I don’t think admob displays Google play ads if Google play is not installed. I have apps on Amazon that use admob and I have never seen a Google play at on them. They usually get seved ads that looks like they direct to websites I haven’t clicked to check but I don’t see any typical Google play ads where there the ad contains the name and rating of the app etc.

Admob is Google and Google is adsense so they’re not short on inventory for any platform. IPhone users who use admob won’t get served Android ads so the same must apply for none Google play users

How do you work as an advertiser. Do you simply go out and try to find people looking for advertising then you post their ads with your admob account? If so, why do they not just do that them selves?

Does the iOS version of admob take users to the iOS App Store then ? Assuming there are such ads on iOS - it would make sense for Google to have those app ads as well ?

Your point about Admob not serving the “app ads” (which take to Google Play to download app) for devices that don’t have Google Play - does make sense. It would be a waste to have those ads - so it is good that Google is filtering out those ads and only showing the other “generic” ads. Though ideally they would show app ads for Amazon App Store if running on Amazon Kindle device etc. (not sure if they do that … ?).

By the way, Google does say explicitly that admob WILL WORK on non-Google Play devices (like Amazon, and perhaps Nokia X android phones):

https://developers.google.com/mobile-ads-sdk/docs/#play

Quote:

The Google Play services library supports even devices that don’t have the Google Play store. To update such devices, download and bundle the latest Google Play services SDK; then relaunch your apps to propagate updates to your users. Devices that do have the Google Play store are automatically updated to the latest version.