Increasing "Discoverability" With AdMob's Download Exchange
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One of the most frequent — and justifiable — gripes from developers about the App Store is that the sheer volume of apps makes discoverability difficult.
AdMob’s new Download Exchange aims to mitigate this problem by an ad swap: show ads for other apps in your app, get ads in other apps for your app. These ads click-through to the advertised app’s on-phone App Store page.
I spoke with Ali Diab, AdMob’s VP of Product Management, about the new offering. I wanted to know about the ratio of the number of ads shown in an application to the number of ads shown for that same application elsewhere. Said Mr. Diab:
It’s not a hard arithmetic calculation. There’s quite a lot of optimization behind how many impressions we show per app based in part on that app’s conversion performance.
Given that the number of ad impressions your app receives is unknowable to you, you’ll need to do some calculations to gauge success:
Ad buyers measure in terms of cost-per-thousand exposures (CPM), cost-per-click (CPC), and cost-per-action (CPA).
AdMob reports the number of ads shown from your app and the number of app installations generated as a result of your ads showing elsewhere. App developers can use these number to calculate an effective-CPA.
Unfortunately, AdMob does not report the number of ads shown for your app nor the click-throughs, so calculating effective-CPM and effective-CPC is not possible. The former could be used to fine-tune the ad content and the latter would give insight into the effectiveness of an app’s App Store content.
Also, ads are only shown for apps that display ads. If you have a wildly successful free app that runs ads you won’t be able to use those credits to advertise one of your paid apps.
Download Exchange ads are not treated as seconds: there are no time of day, geography or demographic restrictions applied to showing these ads. This should mean that AdMob’s optimizations work for you, not against you.
We’re eager to see how AdMob’s Download Exchange performs. If you decide to use Download Exchange please contact us — we’d like to do a “results” post as follow up to this article.
Seems like developers would be sharing a lot of free data with AdMob with nothing in return. AdMob will sell the data to research firms for lots of money. No deal.
I believe most people who are taking part in this Link Exchange program are already using AdMob for ad revenue – meaning AdMob already has all of this data. If you aren’t already using AdMob or another ad provider, why would you want to introduce ads for other applications?
I put admob into the “lite” version of my game (ActionChess). It was only just submitted last night, so I’ll let you know how it goes.