another day is complete (23.feb) 
this day was awesome, 140k impressions, with a ctr of nearly 2 and a eCPM on 0.71
At the end of the month i will put up a small blog with my income reports and also summerize this first month.
this weekend numbers started going upside very steep … 200k impressions (still raising) for today CTR seems to be fixed at 2.5 - quite good
the first user reviews, forum entries and videos are made and I try to appreciate them with a mentioning on my website because they are so much help for my game (and my soul) 
I start to lose overview of new comments and distribution channels, also getting good feedback per mail, I am quite happy with the current results
Congratulations! You’re going great. Look forward to seeing that blog post, as a summary of what’s been happening. I’m sure you’ll be able to make some useful observations about the effectiveness of AdMob in particular (which I haven’t used so much in my popular apps).
the biggest problem with ads in games is this:
the game measures in pixel and the ad in dip (device independent pixels)! and you have to care yourself for different screen sizes (small,large,xlarge) - that makes it a little bit hard to integrate it well into a game. and worse: each ad provider handles different 
there are no big other observations in admob … I cannot tell if something happend because of any changes from me … or just because I got more players.
Have already startet the mentioned blog but I am a little bit low on time …
True that. There’s an attribute which might help, if you’re not using it already:
<supports-screens android:anyDensity="false" />
This tells the Android framework to adjust manually specified pixel dimensions to suit the screen density automatically. This might help for some ad frameworks, but it could well break other things at the same time.
I know what you mean 
I’m just keeping up with the forum at the moment, but I’m way behind on blog posts.
this weekend was simply great. At Sunday there were over 230k impressions, eCPM (0.58) and CTR (2.48%) was a little bit smaller again … that’s because players tend to play Robo Miner many hours I think. Almost 6k clicks reached.
Monday was also very good, but as every monday slightly less … revenue keeps ~ the same because eCPM (0.65) was higher again.
Also because of Robo Miner gets more popular I am assigning some house ads to minesweeper unlimited … its a good game also, i think, but not very popular, lets see if I can give it a push
Some more summaries:
robo miner produced ~2.5 mill impressions the last month and an average eCPM of 0.64 (equals RPM) and CTR of 2.24%
cannot talk about revenue for now because of several reasons
Great numbers. I can do a little math with the numbers you provided and it looks like revenue was pretty good. Congrats.
if the numbers stays like this (or better) I am very satisfied with it Let’s watch the next month if it stays like that … or drops, I have no idea
WOW! Your numbers are getting better every day!!
The game is very popular in germany and russia(!) where most of the downloads come from. Surprisingly US downloads are not so high.
Impression Amount seems to settle since some days, let’s see what weeking is doing and if there is another boom. Next update is ready, some bugfixes in it, maybe at sunday another update with new features
Looks like Robo Miner has peeked last weekend with over 300k Impressions on last saturday. Thanks to Murphys Law and Admob - last weekend was the admob eCPM fail (annoyingly g)
Yesterday was a little bit lower (nearly 300k) but I was releasing the weekly update last week on thursday (this week i released yesterday) and it needs some time till it takes effect, so maybe it is a good thing to release an update on thursday, so it is available all over the world right when weekend begins. Weekends are clearly the strongest days
the admob eCPM is currently at over 1$ - i am impressed.
I had no update the last week and for the first time ever the impression-rate for sunday was lower than the sunday before (~300k / day).
Also the daily installs stopped raising. It seems, that robo miner was at a high rank at google play - I read about it in some reviews, but was not able to confirm it because, I clearly get different numbers because I am in spain (where robo miner ranges at rank ~250 in casual)
my other games are still “low earners” they stuck at around 1000 imp/day.
while Robo Miner has daily downloads of many thousands on google play every other store i use (including samsung) is at a max of ~50/day
That brings me to the conclusion that if you do not need the extra attention from the other stores (you are able to use house ads instead) google play is the only store you’ll need.
That makes things much easier, when it comes to in-app purchases or licensing and in the future, I’ll maybe stick with google play alone
It depends…if you are getting into the sunny spots in Google Play you do not need any other stores, sure. Google Play is by far the biggest store out there for Android.
Other stores like SlideMe can still be a good addition especially if you are not getting seen on Google Play. Sometimes you get more downloads there compared with Google Play.
For example: my game Marbleution was downloaded 1200 times in Google Play, but 38800 times in SlideMe. If you are a small indy developer 38000 downloads are something you should not miss (my 2 cents).
That’s impressing - Robo Miner was downloaded only(!) 16.000 times at slideme (compared to 350k in play) . including ~10 updates (slideme counts every download, inlcuding updates)
maybe slideme has a completely different userbase…
The problem is: you never know what will happen!
One more example:
Dental Drill was “just” downloaded 3300 times on SlideMe…and 38000 times on Google Play. Just the other way round.
Hey guys, what’s your secret. Hundreds of thousands of downloads a month? Millions of impressions? Thousands of dollars? I’m having trouble getting people to even see my game, period.
I submitted my free game to Google Play and challenged my wife to try and find it without searching for it’s exact title. She gave up after 20m. I created an admob campaign for it and it got a bunch of downloads then but not enough. There’s so much click fraud there. Unless you have over 100K of impressions you’ll never get your money back from an ad campaign.
I’ve added keywords and you can find it now if you search for them and scroll waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down. It’s not effective, essentially I get 2 or 3 downloads a day. My active users stays about even. I receive maybe 1000 impressions, maybe a few bucks, on a good day. Some days I make 2 cents. It’s terrible.
I didn’t create the next Draw Something by any means but how many terrible games have over 10K downloads? I doubt I’ll break 500.
I’ve posted my little advertisement on every forum I can think of but those barely make a difference. So please, tell me, what did u guys do to get that kind of visibility?
The normal non-fraudelent click rate is at ~3% … so you need quite an amount of impressions to get a decent amount of clicks (regardless of on which side you are counting g)
What’s your app/game, maybe we can take a look on it and give some hints. You have to make huge amounts of marketing, present it on forums and all over the web, if app is good, ppl will recommend them.
Each app out there with good downloads have a reason for it - you may found the best reason for your app/game and build upon that … i think
3% sounds about right, given how many downloads I got for the number of clicks I paid for. I figured I was throwing that money away but I had to at least try, see for myself if it was worth it. Oh and btw, if u do run an admob campaign, do NOT advertise out of the US. I found that most of the click fraud was happening overseas, especially Asia (fu China). Once I limited the campaign to the US my downloads increased by 10X for the same number of clicks. That’s what I found anyway. It was my own fault, my game is a word scramble. I should have never advertised it out of English speaking countries. But it does go to show u how much fraud there is.
The game is called Word Miner. It’s here:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=BundyGames.WordMinerAd
It’s just a simple game, nothing amazing. I didn’t expect to get rich from it by any means, or even to make my license back. I have a new game in the works, a hack and slash, loot type game (think Diablo). I figured out a way to create a near infinite seemless world with random loot generation (like Diablo) all color coded and organized into tiers of rarity (like Diablo ). And got it working on my phone, I think it stands a much better chance of doing well than a quick little word puzzle. But if visibility is the issue I need to get that fixed before I’m looking at 3 downloads a day for no matter what I release.
However if the issue is simply a case of “crappy game” any suggestions you have I’d greatly appreciate.
I recently found very high sophisticated games releasing on android, industrie is moving So it get’s always harder to make your app popular.
Your game looks good (not like a crappy one) so you just have to point people to it, put some small reviews in forums so people get to know about it.
It is less the problem of click-fraud, more like the developers places some ads. Ever played the free version of Fruit Ninja? I accidentally clicked multiple times on their crappy ad popup …