Hi, this is a minute of Overpass, my name is Eric and I make apps.
Now this week I wanna talk about 'promoting your app through the ad networks'.
So this week, I wanna talk a little bit about putting ads for your app in other apps through
ad networks like iAd or AdMob or Facebook, etc.
And this is the result of last week, Erik Javier posted a comment on last week's Facebook's
page saying that he thought about using Apple's iAd to promote his apps.
And he asked if I had any experience with it.
I came back and said some of the ones I had and he said "maybe you should talk a little
bit about that" and I thought "Okay".
So that's what I'll do.
I'll tell you what - I'll give you my experience with ad networks and promoting through advertisements.
Now, by no means am I an expert.
Just like everything else, I experiment here and there and try different things.
However, maybe this might be able to help if I let you know how things have worked for
me and how I use ads to promote our apps and you might do it better.
Maybe I'm doing it wrong, maybe you could tell me.
But again, just so you know, I'm not an expert but I do use ads all the time to promote apps.
Now when I talk to other people who use advertisements, the first thing they'll tell you is find out
how much money your users will use within your app.
I've talked to other app developers who'll say, "In my app, the lifetime value of a user
is say a dollar and fifty, or three dollars or then dollars, or whatever.
So, for them it makes sense to spend like one dollar per install through advertising.
For me, because most of our apps are free, and we make money through advertising, I make
a lot less per user.
I make about, i don't know, ten or twenty cents per user on an average, probably even
less than that.
I mean, we have to have huge volumes in order to bring in enough money to pay the bills
and everything like that.
So, for me it's much less.
So if you have like a high, or if you monetize really well like through in app purchases
or through sales or whatever, it makes a lot of sense to spend a dollar if your users are
gonna spend five dollars within the app.
However, if your users are gonna spend ten cents within the app, it doesn't make a lot
of sense to spend a dollar unless you're doing it to increase momentum.
So this is kinda how we do it.
When you release an app, I've said this over and over again, the app market is so saturated
that when you release an app to the app store, nobody finds it, it's just completely dead.
And in order to get people to download it, it needs to rank well.
In order to rank well, it has to have a lot of downloads and reviews.
In order to have lots of downloads and reviews, it has to rank well for people to find it.
So it's a vicious circle and sometimes, you need that spark right when you launch in order
to get people into it.
So sometimes it's worth spending a couple hundred dollars just to get people in and
hopefully you get enough people in that will leave reviews and things will climb up in
the ranks and you'll start getting some momentum and things going because it's so hard to have
that first spark, just to get things going.
So that's really how much use it.
Now with ads, there's two ways of doing it.
If keep talking to a lot of app developers, or you go to these seminars that sometimes
talk about paid installs.
And when I first about 'paid installs' it sounded like something illegal.
Like paid reviews or paying for something that you shouldn't be doing.
But paid installs, what that means is having advertisements that are linked to installation.
So you can run your ads and you only pay if somebody installs the app.
Like you were gonna use Facebook, you could include the Facebook SDK within your app and
then what that'll do is when the app gets installed, it will report back to Facebook
saying this is the result of that advertisement, and then you could kinda track things that
way.
The other way you could do it is based on click.
So, if somebody click on the ad, they get to the app page, all that kind of stuff.
For me, because we use Corona SDk a lot, we tend to not use the in-app, use the paid installs,
however you can do it with Corona SDK.
It's just sometimes it's more trouble than its worth.
So we usually go that way.
So I'm gonna go through the three different ad networks that I've used in the past.
If you use something different and if you had success, please leave a comment below
'cause hey, I'd love to know what works and what doesn't and I'll tell you what's worked
and what hasn't for us.
So over here, if you look at my screen, you see first I'll go through Twitter.
So, Twitter has Twitter Advertisements ad if you're an app developer and if you tweeted
about your app, then you probably get the spam from Twitter saying "Hey you could promote
this through Twitter."
So we tried this last October for an app called Chinese Heroes.
So, I didn't spend a lot on this.
I think I had a daily budget of four pounds and it didn't even use four pounds each and
I think it was targeted towards people who said I wanna learn Chinese and learn Chinese
and stuff like that.
So here you can see the statistics for that time.
Over the course of the month, we had two thousand or 2.63 thousand impressions and we only spend
four pounds, forty seven.
So it wasn't bad, however, because we had a daily budget of four pounds, I expected
to be spending a lot more than that.
And of that, we didn't have that many installations so if you see down here at the bottom, we
have the date, we spent four pound forty-seven, we had 2,631 impressions, however, only eleven
people clicked on that ad.
So it was 41 P per click.
And Twitter, as far as I was concerned, this didn't work very well.
As far as I was concerned, advertising on Twitter was like throwing money into the wind.
Now again, maybe my ad sucked, maybe the app wasn't that interesting, but I don't think
it got in front of enough people.
So the nature of Twitter is everything is just streaming by so quick, it's hard to stop
and look at it.
And, plus, it's not difficult to go through and do a Twitter search and search for these
people manually and you just sort of spam them and send tweets or whatever yourself,
but I don't do that.
So that's the first network.
It's Twitter and again, hardly worth it.
I've done a lot of advertisements through AdMob because we make money through AdMob
so obviously it makes sense to use AdMob for other stuff.
So the nice thing about AdMob is so many people are using it.
And you could do like a really low bid per click so I've done bids as low as 2 P per
click or you know, 4 cents per click and actually just had it filling up so I mean, there are
just so many impressions that they have to fill that even if you're not a high bidder,
it'll get in there somewhere.
So.
here's what we did for Algebra Study Cards earlier this year, which we released.
And to give you and idea, in total, I actually spent quite a bit on this.
I had this going for quite a while.
I spent 253 pounds over the course of the campaign.
It actually had 2, 244, 000 impressions, so not bad.
And of those, we had 13, 00 clicks.
Now the problem with this is we've only had 313 conversions, only 313 people actually
installed the app.
However, what this shows me is that there wasn't a problem with the ad network here,
it was actually, the problem with it was when they get to my app page, it's not converting,
for whatever reason: I need to change screenshots, I need to change the language, but it was
doing what it was supposed to do, which was getting people to the app page.
So that worked really well and it was very low cost.
However, there's one thing about AdMob which is really really strange for me was if I set
a budget, like a daily budget like 5 pounds, it would go up to ten or fifteen pounds and
what it does is it takes an average over the month.
So it was a bit shocking so I didn't actually stick to that.
Now the best ad network that you can do, as far as I'm concerned, is Facebook.
Now Facebook, if I can show you one of our Facebook ads here for again Chinese Heroes
which we renamed to Chinese Mandarin Alpha Team.
Facebook is really good 'cause Facebook knows all about the users, it knows everything about
the people it's showing the ads to.
Like with Facebook, I could say I want everybody who's interested in learning Chinese, or everybody
who's you know, I wan't teachers or I want teachers who are women between the ages of
30 and 35, you know it's just really really targeted.
And also, as it's serving the ads and as people are installing it, once you put the SDK in
your app, you start getting information based on the users.
So you could find out who are the common users for your apps.
It's called like your model users.
So after you start getting some downloads, you can see that most people who download
this are women of this age group or teenagers or they live in this country.
And then you can start targeting your ads more towards that location.
So here's an ad that we ran.
Now.
the problem with Facebook is that it's so good and everybody uses it that it's gotten
so expensive.
Here's one we did for Chinese Heroes and here you can see it served quite a lot of ads and
it reached a lot of people but the actual cost per install was four pounds seventy eight.
So that's my experience with it, which is way to high, as far as I'm concerned.
And again, it could be the message, it's difficult to quantify these kind of stuff, however,
it's doing what it's supposed to do, which is get it in front of people.
It's really really good but it depends on how much money you make from the app.
I mean it's really good and if you start using this and you have look alike audiences, you
could go ahead and say I want everybody of this demographic to get this ad, then you
should do a lot a better.
And that's what a lot of the professional app developers are doing at the moment.
So that's it.
In terms with my experience with ads, I use ads a lot.
I don't use them in terms of, like a continuous, I don't have continuous campaigns running,
but when I launch an app, I will, more often that not, start an add campaign somewhere
just to at least start to get people into it.
Facebook is probably the best but again it's more expensive.
So if you're using ads, please let me know you're using them 'cause it's really an interesting
topic to me and Erik I hope that helps at least a little bit and but keep looking around
and the best way to find out how well the ads work is to try them.
So, don't just release one ad then put all your money into it.
Release several 'cause one of them is gonna outperform the others.
And set like a really, well not low, but set a daily budget so you don't completely go
broke on the first day.
Anyway, that's it for this week.
I hope this has been helpful.
I'll talk to you next week.
Bye.
Hey, thanks very much for watching the video.
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a week, and then I can tell you everything else we learn about in the future, about the
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Thanks.
Bye!