FingerBakery Blog

I know the title of this blog post is ugly, but I’m hoping to do a tiny bit of optimization for my search results and I want to make sure to make it clear that Pokerbot is an iPhone poker game. Now let’s move beyond that and get into this: I mentioned on my Twitter account earlier today that I ran a small ad buy to advertise the game. I thought I would put some details in here:

I bought $50 of ads on Admob. That’s the minimum amount they will do, and I don’t really think the ROI is going to be positive so it’s not like I wanted to spend any more than that right now.

I made a big mistake when I placed the ad, I for some reason thought $0.05 was the minimum bid you could put in per click, but I realized after it had spent half of my budget that I could bid and pay $0.03 per click if I wanted to, so I did that. This means that I received 1224 clicks, but I could have bought 1666 clicks for that same amount of money, oops. So I burned about $12.50 or so of equity there.

I don’t see ANY downside to paying  0.03/click versus 0.05/click, the traffic coming from those clicks is going to be equal quality I am pretty positive. I’m glad I didn’t make this mistake if I was somehow doing a large buy.

Okay, so, I mentioned I don’t think I’ll make an immediate profit on this buy. I just don’t see it happening, although it’d be nice if it did make some sort of return. For now, I’m just curious to try out a tiny buy, see what happens, and maybe get moved up in the charts temporarily. And the chart move HAS happened, I’m at 74th in card games as I write this, from a low of  119 earlier in the day before the ads started running. Not something that’ll help me immensely, but it’ll be interesting to see how my ranking shakes out over the next day or so, I don’t really know what sort of criteria or sliding time scale the App Store rankings are based on.

I went through college in an advertising program, and I looooove reading/thinking about marketing stuff, so being able just to mess around with little ad buys like this excites me. I have to wait to see my sales reports tomorrow to know if this had any impact on sales at all, it could be that everyone who clicked through left without buying, I have no clue what kind of conversion rate to expect.

One thing that I am hopeful may have helped with conversion is that I made the ad for Pokerbot dull and I included the price of the app (99 cents now) in the actual ad. Hopefully this deterred a lot of the people who will never pay for any app from even clicking on the ad. The ad was just a small version of my app’s icon, along with black and white text that says “POKERBOT: $0.99 Heads Up Poker”.

It’s funny writing ads that are kind of meant to NOT get clicked when most of what people talk about is how to create ads that DO get clicked, but that’s the difference between CPM and CPC advertising, I am really just looking for qualified buyers. I’m not made of nickels goddamnit!

So here are the stats on the ad buy, and please hit me up on my Twitter with any questions or whatnot, I love talking about this stuff or comparing notes more than anything.

Total impressions: 144,905

Clicks: 1244

CTR: 0.84%

Cost: $50.00

Average CPC: 0.04 (due to my sloppiness as mentioned)

Oh and I chose to run this buy as a short blast, the whole campaign ran in maybe 4 hours or so.

I will update the blog tomorrow with any information I gain about sales resulting in these ads, etc.