Thought it might be interesting to share some stats on how iAds are performing.
Heart Rate - Free has now been live for 2-3 weeks. Interestingly it somehow ended up in the wrong category, going into Entertainment when it was supposed to go into Health and Fitness. I don’t know what impact that has had on downloads or advertising revenue.
Over the two weeks it’s been into the top 100 entertainment apps in various countries (it’s doing particularly well in Hong Kong for some reason). In the US it got to around 60 ish before dropping out of the charts. I think it’s now hovering around the 200 mark. To get into the top 100 free entertainment apps required over 1500 downloads a day in the US.
Worldwide the application has been downloaded around 40-50,000 times. On its best performing day there were just under 9,500 downloads world wide. Currently it’s doing around 1,000 downloads a day, but there is a definitely downward trend.
When I was building the app I had already decided that it should be free so added AdMob adverts and then at the last moment decided that I might as well add iAds to the mix.
As iAds are not available in all countries and having heard that fill rates could be very low I set the app up so that it would first try to get an iAd and if that failed it would pull down an AdMob ad. That way as iAds were rolled out to more countries the app would pick them automatically.
The iAd reporting front end is a little bit clunky in how much you can slice and dice the data. What I’d really like to show is revenue broken out by time for the US - which is where iAds are mostly available (UK and France only started having inventory a few days ago). But here are the top 10 countries by ad requests since the app went live.
| Country Name | Revenue | eCPM | Requests | Impressions | Fill Rate | CTR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hong Kong | $0.00 | $0.00 | 284868 | 0 | 0.00% | 0.00% |
| Unknown | $0.00 | $0.00 | 97132 | 0 | 0.00% | 0.00% |
| United States | $1,230.03 | $29.75 | 83133 | 41348 | 49.74% | 2.81% |
| China | $0.00 | $0.00 | 77595 | 0 | 0.00% | 0.00% |
| Israel | $0.00 | $0.00 | 70080 | 0 | 0.00% | 0.00% |
| France | $14.29 | $8.87 | 58591 | 1612 | 2.75% | 4.03% |
| Canada | $0.36 | $2.86 | 48669 | 126 | 0.26% | 2.38% |
| UK/GB | $10.31 | $7.38 | 24280 | 1397 | 5.75% | 3.29% |
| Korea, Republic of | $0.00 | $0.00 | 20992 | 0 | 0.00% | 0.00% |
Fill rates for the US are actually pretty reasonable at just under 50%. eCPM is amazing at amost $30 when you compare it with the stats from AdMob over the same period of time:
| Revenu | eCPM | Request | Impressions | Fill Rate | CTR through rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $675.38 | $2.22 | 304,627 | 303,980 | 99.79% | 4.51% |
The iAds are generating almost 15 times the eCPM.
From its peak of $160 in a day revenue has declined quite rapidly. There’s almost a direct correlation between the number of downloads in the US and amount of revenue. One problem with the heart rate app is that it doesn’t really have anything currently to make the user come back to it very often. So the ad revenue tends to be tightly coupled to new users.
The peak at the end of the chart corresponds to using the money generated from the AdMob ads on advertising the app in the US. This is definitely leading to more downloads, but it’s not enough to keep the app in the charts in the entertainment category.
Heart Rate - Free is the first reasonably successful free app I’ve produced - I’m not a big fan of adverts in apps, but there does seem to be a compelling case for it. It will be interesting to see if the revenue continues when the app is really out in the wastelands and only getting 1 or 2 downloads a day.