Since the launch of the iPhone App Store, we have helped hundreds of iPhone publishers promote their apps worldwide. While the quality of an app is ultimately the biggest driver of success, advertising is an effective tool to help drive downloads of your application, raise user awareness, and increase the value of your brand. Used in combination with other marketing activities such as press, cross promotion, and Twitter, advertising can help your app get ranked and gain the visibility it needs in the App Store to be a huge success.
We strongly believe that advertisers need actionable data to evaluate the performance of their campaigns. That’s why we strongly encourage all our iPhone advertisers to utilize our Download Tracking product, which enables you to measure the cost per download and the conversion rate of your campaign. This information allows you to optimize your campaign in flight by selecting the ads and targeting parameters with the best performance. You can then also make an informed decision on whether the cost per acquisition, coupled with the benefits of advertising-generated branding and user awareness, justify continued marketing investment.
Every ad campaign performs differently. Factors such as the appeal of the app, effectiveness of the landing page, and user reviews all contribute to willingness of a consumer to actually download the app after they visit the App Store page. As you might expect, consumers are much more likely to download a free app than to purchase a paid app and advertisers need to have different expectations regarding their free and paid campaigns. The conversion ranges below are gathered from a wide variety of iPhone campaigns with our Download Tracking tool enabled.
Advertising free apps is a great way to drive low cost user acquisition and get your app discovered by a broad range of people. Depending on the application, conversion rates for free apps are typically around 10%, but vary from 5-20% depending on the app. This means that for every 100 people who click on your advertisement, roughly 10 will install your app.
Conversion rates are far lower for paid apps with generally only 1% of clicks converting into paid customers. This means that for every 100 people who click on your advertisement, roughly 1 will install your app. For many paid apps, this may result in a cost per acquisition that may be higher than the sales price of the app. Installing Download Tracking is especially critical for campaigns promoting paid apps.
With our recent launch of House Ads, AdMob publishers can promote their apps using their own inventory for free. Anecdotally, we have heard higher conversion rates than those above for publishers advertising their own properties. As we gather more information on the performance of House Ads, we will pass it along.
For additional iPhone advertiser tips on how to increase your conversion rates, please visit our previous blog post and Help Center. Contact us at support@admob.com if you have any questions or join our AdMob Advertiser Discussion Group, we’d be happy to help.
Mike F.
Product Marketing
