FingerBakery Blog

By the way, after my experiment with running ads on Admob, I ran another $50 buy because I wanted to REALLY try and get the lowest clickthrough ratio possible (to ensure the most actually-interested buyers) and try a few different ads. My plan was to change my app’s price a couple of times and see how it affected the sales through the ads, and also try to write my ad so noone would want to click it except people who genuinely wanted an iPhone poker app. As with my first experiment, I knew I would lose some money, that was expected.

Long story short, I failed at writing a less clickable ad and I got a way higher CTR than my previous ad. Woops. On top of that the Admob campaign system is kind of idiotic and I wasn’t able to break that $50 into 3 different campaigns for whatever reason.

I talked to a couple of people who have also done campaigns on Admob for their apps, and when all is said and done, one thing is clear: It is a terrible idea. I (and others) are pretty positive that a huge number of the clicks you get are misclicks, and just in general the ads do not work. I knew from the start that these ads would not be immediately profitable or anything, but they are just garbage. I don’t think companies buying ads on Admob have any clue what a sewer their money is going down, but I shudder to think what the actual ROI is on Admob ads in general. Dismal.

Oh and click fraud, I have serious wonders about it. There was just a big fraud case discovered with a developer listed as Thuat Nguyen selling 40+ Vietnamese-language comic books and how people’s iTunes accounts were hacked to buy them. This is kind of interesting to me because this is something I wrote in an email 11 days ago to someone about possible click fraud in Admob iPhone apps:

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As insane as it sounds for people to do this for 5 cents, I would not rule out there being companies out there who are developing crappy spam apps and sticking (Admob ads) in those apps, then hiring people to sit and click ads in them constantly. Admob says they have click-fraud detection technology, but who KNOWS how effective it is. It seems nuts to think people are clicking for 5 cents, but I don’t see why they wouldn’t be, there are already a bunch of people who do menial tasks on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk site for way less than that, and there are tons of spammy appmakers with hundreds of apps in the store. I bet there is at least one company in China or somewhere with a ton of free apps that just hires people to click on the ads.

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Now that the whole thing about the Vietnamese/Chinese iTunes hacking has come to light I am even more convinced that there is a decent chance this is happening somewhere. I mean, anytime there is any method of making money online, someone is trying to game or cheat it in some way, and I don’t see why Admob would be any different.