iAd Workbench Results

OK, so here are the results of my 8.5 day, $68  iAd experiment. Sorry about the awful formatting of the table, but it's late at night and I'm too tired to fix it.

Spend (USD)	Impressions	Avg. CPM (USD)	Taps	TTR (%)	Avg. CPC (USD)	Conversions	Conversion Rate (%)	Avg. CPA (USD)	Visits	Content Views	Content Views/Visit	Video Impressions
67.99	1,194,135	0.06	3,701	0.31%	0.02	120	3.24%	0.57	-	0	-	0
5.60	264,966	0.02	559	0.21%	0.01	16	2.86%	0.35	-	0	-	0
8.57	219,195	0.04	576	0.26%	0.01	16	2.78%	0.54	-	0	-	0
6.89	118,690	0.06	393	0.33%	0.02	15	3.82%	0.46	-	0	-	0
6.15	89,223	0.07	313	0.35%	0.02	11	3.51%	0.56	-	0	-	0
6.52	85,262	0.08	295	0.35%	0.02	19	6.44%	0.34	-	0	-	0
6.72	99,415	0.07	298	0.30%	0.02	11	3.69%	0.61	-	0	-	0
10.03	125,192	0.08	438	0.35%	0.02	12	2.74%	0.84	-	0	-	0
10.04	105,953	0.09	471	0.44%	0.02	15	3.18%	0.67	-	0	-	0
7.47	86,239	0.09	358	0.42%	0.02	5	1.40%	1.49

This ad campaign turned out to be about an order of magnitude more effective than Google Adwords or Facebook advertising, but in terms of the economics for Reader for Gmail it still doesn't cut it. Although my in-app purchase is less than a month old, the evidence to date seems to suggest that for about every 40 downloads, I get about 1 in-app purchase, i.e. only about 2.5 percent of downloads result in someone paying to get rid of ads between Gmail messages. Since my cut of an in-app purchase is about $1.40, this means that I should not be spending more than $0.03 per download. As you can see from the above table, on my best day, I got 19 downloads through my iAd banner, at an average cost of $0.34 per download. So even that is an order of magnitude worse than where I need to be. The average price per banner ad click is only something like $0.02, so I'm guessing that the vast majority of these clicks must be accidental. Perhaps even a lot of the downloads are accidental too. Drunk people playing around with their phones late at night? I don't know. 

So now I've decided to try out advertising through Twitter. I'm not sure how the bidding with Twitter will work out... if my lowball, cheapo bids actually get shown to people, I think I might stand a reasonable chance of getting some downloads at a good price. Results to follow in 4 or 5 days...