Advertisers have been clamoring to get more detailed information from the iPhone App Store so they can accurately assess marketing effectiveness, including the return from advertising spend. There have been a number of excellent blog posts on this topic that are worth reading.

Starting today this is no longer an issue for AdMob’s advertisers. AdMob’s new Download Tracking service allows app developers to track downloads driven from AdMob’s App Store ads. For the first time, advertisers can accurately monitor App Store conversion rates – clicks on an ad that lead to a completed download of the advertised application – enabling them to precisely measure their return from advertising on AdMob’s network.  Advertisers can use Download Tracking to view and track multiple applications and drill down to look at conversion rates by specific ad and for specific dates.

Download Tracking works like this:

AdMob’s advertisers are already using this new information to write better ads, calculate their return on ad spend, tune their App Info pages, and develop better pricing strategies. A limited group of iPhone applications began testing AdMob’s Download Tracking in December, and the aggregate data already highlights some interesting trends:

• Free applications have an average conversion rate of 10 percent, significantly higher than the average 1 percent conversion rate for paid applications.
• Games generally have higher conversion rates than other categories of applications, up to a 100 percent improvement over non-game applications at similar price points.
• The App Store is an effective distribution platform for free applications. The average acquisition cost for free applications is under $1.00, significantly less than average application download costs on the PC Web.

It’s easy to get started. If you’re already serving AdMob ads in your App, you’re automatically set up. If not, you can integrate the tracking code by adding a small code snippet to your App, or using our HTTP API to report new downloads to AdMob. For more details, log into your account on admob.com and visit Download Tracking or check out the AdMob Developer Wiki.

Mike M.
Product