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I thought this was interesting and was keen to share my experience in publishing apps with either free with ads or paid with no ads. With over 800 downloads with my free apps I've earned roughly $7 USD in 6months. See graph..



My latest app Advanced Hacker has only been out a week and I've already made $8 USD.

Now for the real test! I plan to put that money into ad promotions and will gladly report my findings as they develope.

Anyone else like to share their experiences?

You should read this post. I planned to put it in the newsletter sometime.

I would be quite wary of ad promotions. There seem to be a lot of people trawling the app stores and trying to sell their wares. There seems to me to be no rhyme nor reason why some games take off (Flappy Bird ?) and some don't.

For the same reasons as Google - 10% good product, 40% marketing and 50% luck.

You can have the best product in the world, but history shows that luck still plays a huge part in success.

I don't have any experience in mobile marketing to share, other than as a consumer. When I see Candy Crush pop up, I think "That's the game everyone is talking about" and it's an opportunity for me to get it, without going to any effort of finding it myself. For 90% of the ads, I ignore them because I don't recognise them or they look like every other Knight-in-Shining-Armour based game.

The other side is seeing a game that just hits the spot for you, which will be a very small percentage. For example, if an ad popped up for a traditional British wheeler-dealer game in the style of Minder, I'd click it in an instant. The chances (luck) of someone making it and me seeing an ad for it are very slim indeed.

I'd happily share my experiences with promoting. I've had a little go at promoting in both AdMob and AppBrain...

I first tried a very small experiment with 'Happy Chick - Flying Game' on Android, in AdMob. My budget was £10 a day over 3 days and this resulted in the following;

Impressions: 710,546
Clicks: 2,930
Conversions: 33 (Although I'm not sure how they report this as we didn't get that many actual downloads)
Cost/Conv: £0.89

I then thought I'd try the same game on iOS, only this time I ran it for only a day (same budget)

Impressions: 1,629,822
Clicks: 1,150
Conversions: 0 (Although I think this is because AdMob cannot actually track iOS without the necessary SDK. Going by my download stats though, 0 wasn't far off lol)

After this disappointing run, I thought I'd try a service which offers 'Cost Per Install', as opposed to AdMob's 'Cost Per Click'. For me this was abit of a no brainer, why would I want to pay someone just for clicking my ad? I'd much rather pay only when the app is installed. Anyway, AppBrain offers this, so AppBrain was my next experiment...

I thought I'd up my game (a little lol) for AppBrain, and added $100 with a daily budget of $25. I also went with my other app 'Double Jump' (Android). I was messing around with my bid over the first couple days, but eventually settled with around $0.25 per install... This was the result...



A bid of $0.25 is very very low (might have actually been the lowest), and from all the installs I got, the vast majority were from Iraq/Iran... I'm told that to hit markets like UK/US, your bid needs to be around the $2.00 mark... (which would have resulted in only 50 downloads with my $100 budget!!).

I know this is only a very very small sample, so should be taken lightly, but I thought it'd be good to share my experiences anyway, seeing as you asked

In my opinion (and I've read this many times), in order for 'In App Advertising' to be successful, you have to pump thousands into it! I would however recommend AppBrain over AdMob should you wish to have a little go yourself... Good Luck