There’s nothing quite like spending hundreds of hours on a product just to see it get swallowed whole by the sea of other apps. The App Store is quite unforgiving with fast user adoption at the early stages of deployment being pivotal to success.
With so many developers out there trying to find the magic ingredient to massive success, surely there are hundreds of services aimed at the little guy who doesn’t have a big name yet.
Well, there are options, and I’ve tried a few, but if ever there’s a gap in the market for an entrepreneur to fill, getting small time Apps noticed would be it.
Google Adwords
The first path for many may be towards Google Adwords. Surely a network of ads that spans the globe will easily reach into every home and spread the news of your new app.
Unfortunately, there are a few things halting your success. Firstly (and this goes for all advertising) your app is usually cheap – real cheap. Somehow the iPhone App market has been driven into the ground. If one takes a purely economical rational approach to buying apps, only one thing has to be asked – What else can I buy with my $0.99? And for most of the Apps out there for $0.99, you’re doing extremely well compared to what else that $0.99 would get you. But customers aren’t happy. Your App is in a no-mans land where unless you make an app that’s worth much more, satisfaction will be hard to come by.
But all that aside, cheap apps don’t do so well when advertising via Google. To get good ad positions, with high sale rates, you have to pay up to 25 or 35 cents per click. And that just doesn’t add up. I’ve tried smaller click costs ($0.01) but they end up going to the wrong customers and I get a whopping 95% bounce rate on customers coming in on the ads. So Google isn’t the answer.
Admob Ads
The next big things is Admob. Here you can create ads that appear only on iPhones, so you know people will be able to download your app. So what did I find? Firstly, ad click costs are much higher here. The lowest you can go is $0.03. So given an input of $50, I managed to get some 1600 clicks in just two minutes. I was stoked! 1600 iPhone users interested in my ad. And so quickly too! But what did the sales data show? Nothing.
Not even a little spike appeared in the sales data following the ads being placed on the network. Is this due to fraud? Or just people not wanting to buy?
Other
There are of course other options to advertising. Pick an iPhone app site and they’ll usually have advertising options. They can be quite a hefty outlay with no assurance that they will increase sales, so it’s a bit of a risk. I haven’t tried any of these options, but if you have, please let us know what you found.