I've been writing (
Facebooking primarily) about development for the Android platform for the last few months now. I solicited ideas from friends and family. My sales went from $3-5/day up to $30-50/day and now up to around $70-100/day. As one would expect, some of my apps sell better than others. As you can see in other posts, some people feel I'm spamming the market. People who buy the app seem to love it based on the feedback I get. I have over
100 variations of 2 primary applications. One application shows local events (i.e. music, culinary, etc.) and the other shows local favorite places (i.e. sushi, home improvement, etc). I've experimented with a number of things including pricing. I've priced from free (which gets a LOT of downloads, but I can't figure out a way to make that of value to me) to $.99, $1.99 and $2.99. Over the past many weeks I reduced most of my apps to $.99, so that I could get a benchmark at $.99. This week I've raised some of my prices to $1.99. Next week I'm going to raise them to $2.99. It's like playing the lemonade game. I'm trying to determine the price where I sell the most (i.e. net sales - sales less cancellations).
This past week I experimented with Admob. Admob was purchased by Google a while back. Therefore I assumed it must be the premier mobile advertising provider. However...I was wrong! I experimented (similar to this
experiment) by spending $100 on advertising. My ad ended up running for about an hour - you can spend a WHOLE bunch of money in a day!!!! I spent $.05 per who knows what...they just ask how much you want to bid, but they don't really explain the pricing - is it per click through? Per impression? What?
It took me days to get my account set up. The site is one of the worst I've worked with. When I finally got my account and ad set up, it said it was waiting for approval. It took me a while to figure out if I needed to approve the ad - or them. It's them who has to approve. I waited 3 days for them to approve a simple ad that read "Local Events - View Events in area" and linked to my app. You only get 30 characters in your ad. After 3 days, they said my ad was declined and gave a very cryptic explanation - so I reached out to support, who got back to me a couple days later. They said it was a clerical error that my ad was now approved. By the time I got to their site, I had already spent $50! So I upped my limit to $100 for the day...yet the stats didn't update. It says on their site that the stats are 90 minutes behind. So I waited 90 minutes, then 180 minutes...then...sometime later the stats finally appeared!
During the time that my ad ran, my assumption was that I would sell 0 copies of my app. I ended up selling 3 copies of my app. That's $3 in gross revenue or $2.10 in net revenue. I spent $100 to get a return of $2.10!!!! Not a great return on my investment. In other words, this is ineffective advertising!
They said I received 356,555 impressions. That's a LOT of apps that displayed my ad! They said I received 1,833 click throughs. 1,833 people reading about my app is pretty good success...yet only 3 people purchased it. Holy smokes that's terrible ROI.
So the bottom line - this isn't a method I can recommend to drive business to your apps!
I also tried making money by selling advertising for Admob within my app. This is completely ineffective as I've made $.01 (and they have made a whole lot more) from my free "sales." I would have made MANY times this amount my selling my app. Even if I sold only one copy, I would have made 100 times my Admob ROI.
So...back to the drawing board! If you have any ideas about how to sell more apps, please pass them on!!!