Hey, this is the Daily Overpass. My name is Eric and I make apps.
Now today, I want to talk about driving with the parking brake on.
Alright, so it's a bit of a gray day here today. I'm out of the office, just in my
back yard, I'm about to go in and do a full workday. But I wanted to tell you
guys, about something first. Now, this video is gonna be a little bit-
it's gonna be a little bit shorter and I don't really have a topic, but I'm just
gonna explain to you something. Something that, you know, that's happened to be
in the last few days, with my AdMob account. So basically over the last
three or four months, my AdMob has been dropping like each day consistently.
Whereas, I was happy with 120 pounds a day back in
January, now has gotten to be out you know a
hundred pounds a day on average. But in the last week or so,
it's gotten- it's falling a lot like it's been- yesterday was that
all-time low like 65 and that's not an all-time low, of course. When I started
out, it was way lower than that. But like for this time, it's about
half of what it was last year at this time. So, a bit
concerning. Each day, I've been looking at it, you know, trying
to figure out what's going wrong. Thinking it must be on the
AdMob side. And because you're not control over- in control of rpms
and everything like that, I just kind of think hopefully that'll pick up. And then
I start looking more closely at the fill rates or the match rates.
Then I realized that my match rates have started going down and down and down.
Because this is one of the problems when you have so many
apps. It's like trying to find that needle in a haystack,
where's that coming from. So basically I've gone through like
a hundred apps and you have several hundred ad spaces or ad
units, trying to find out which one of those is the culprit. Finally, a couple
days ago I found out it was Ear Spy for iOS, the free version. It was one of the
ad placements. So, I finally narrowed it down to that one and I
should have looked there first because it was one of the big ones, right? And we
did a- so I figured, well, there's obviously something wrong with
iOS and AdMob, because that was a conclusion I
left to. I went through and I decided I was going to switch out AdMob and go
to Apple Deal. An Apple Deal, if you haven't used it, it's like a an aggregate-
so it's almost like a mediation service where you can set up your AdMob
and then all these other services it just uses, you know, automatically and
then it will fill the highest eCPM into it. Apparently, it's pretty good. But
I've only used it for one app, which is Spanish Bubble Bath and that doesn't
have a lot of impressions. So that was my test. But when AdMob
is working fine, I don't want to mess with that. That's the reason why
I've always stuck with AdMob. So, I was going through yesterday morning and I'm
putting into the Swift code, and I'm putting in- get all the
Apple Deal libraries and everything. I'm not the best with iOS. Swift I
can handle. But you know, it's still the pods and everything and every
time you upgrade your Mac OS- I don't know if you guys get this
problem, but I just have loads of problems with it.
Anyway, spent the morning doing that and as I'm going through doing it and
putting everything through, then I see the problem. I see it in the code.
It's a- so a few months ago I had the the app converted from Objective C
to Swift because so it be more manageable for me and I can make these
small changes, right? And the development team that did it were in
India. That's not saying Indian developers are bad. I mean, they were
actually really good developers. So, they did everything but this was just like a
minor mistake. The ad request, the ad ID that was calling for
interstitials was actually sending the banner ad ID. It was kind of thing.
I mean, I looked through the code, I looked through it several times, I looked
through it when it was done, I found a few minor issues back when I
first got it and and I fixed those myself. Alright, but the code was really
well structured. It was really well done. And then I found this- the wrong variable,
the wrong string going through, so that's the reason why that fill rate was so low.
But the thing was, I had so many legacy apps out there. I didn't pick it up right
away because it was still that ad unit was still working, it was still filling
ads. So anyway, it was like I was so relieved to find it. In fact, I was-
to find this one little issue is like driving with the parking brake on.
I was using this analogy like sometimes, you just
find something and you realize I've been driving this whole time with a parking
brake on. If you've ever done that, you pull away and you're like, I
don't like this, it's so sluggish- oh! You put that thing down and you're back to
normal. So that's kind of what it's like
Anyway, I fixed that and I released it and hopefully everything
will pick it back to normal. It's always nice to find a smoking gun like that.
This is like- by the way, that I could be angry at the developer who did it
because you know, it cost me- must cost me a couple thousand pounds,
in the last- it was about four months ago that the change was made.
But it's really on me. And the reason I say that because most of
the code was really well structured. Yeah, this is one of those just like a misstep.
Like every developer has a misstep, you just do like one little wrong thing, you
have one little thing that doesn't quite work the way
that it should. Or you get one variable wrong, you know that's kind of stuff. I
just- you know, having been in this a long time, I expect it was down to me to
pick it up. Anyway, I'm really relieved to have found it and I know some of
you guys are thinking, Eric's so amateur. And right. That's what I'm saying too.
Man, Eric, that's so amateur! But, what I want to ask you, guys, are you
finding AdMob to be getting worse than it was a year ago? I think
just in general, because even with that bug in there's been four months, like a
month ago, it wasn't that bad. Then like just in the last three or four
weeks, I've found it to get really, really low. It's not just the the RPMs,
it's the- it was the fill rate and everything like that. So, what is your
experience? Question number two: Is anybody out there using Apple Deal and if
you are, how are you finding it? Is it working well for you? Because I have been
tempted to take all of my apps and move it on to that. The one that I
have is a test case. It's doing okay, but it's not, you know, it just doesn't
have enough- it doesn't have enough downloads and enough impressions.
I haven't really decided whether I want to take the big guys into it and actually
move those into Apple Deal with one of these other kind of
aggregate services. But anyway, let me know what you guys think. Sorry,
I missed yesterday, actually I did do a video yesterday but the sound wall,
it was really bad and didn't put it up. I basically talked about what I'm
talking about now. Anyway, I will be back tomorrow and that's it for
today. I'll talk to you, guys, tomorrow!