I had established the links because I was hoping to earn a bit of passive income from these links, with the exception of Dropbox where I wanted just wanted to increase my free storage. This was the only successful part, I raised my storage to just under 25 GB over the past year.

A long hard look at where our income was actually coming from revealed that advertising made up only 1% of revenues, with affiliate commissions only be a fraction of that. All in all I was giving mixed messaging and noise to my readers, while at the same time not deriving any relevant monetary value from it.Also, we recently passed the 6000 follower milestone on Twitter. When I granted a wish to the lucky person his first one was for one of the affiliate links in my parts store. Talk about mixed messaging…

There was a time when I was excited about the prospect of sending a bit of traffic to other people’s websites in exchange for sharing in their success. But it turns out that you need orders of magnitude more of the first to actually notice the second. So I was not seeing the upside, but the affiliation noise was only giving me the downside.

So I learned my lesson. I’ll quit the bait-and-switch game and leave that to the big guys. There are no more affiliate links, anywhere on Cocoanetics.com. Yes, I could have come to this realization sooner, but better late than never!

Having removed that you might be wondering why there are still ads in some very prominent places. For example there is a wide banner inserted at the place of the <MORE> tag in each article which gives it about 13000 views per month which is nothing to sneeze at. So yes, you can still advertise here.

BuySellAds.com is doing a great job in helping us small guys sell ad space. And not just the small guys, even heavy-weights as Ray Wenderlich are using BSA. And if it is good enough for Ray then it is good enough for most of us.

Tried all week to get iAds & AdMod into same app. Your DTBannerManager be perfect. Im broke do you have a lay away plan

You are in luck! At the moment I am trying to grow my audience (for both my blog and my products) and to do so I am also willing to enter into cooperations that involve exchanging advertisement for code.

Google Analytics plots visits to Cocoanetics as a slightly upward trend that constantly dips on weekends. I wonder why … only half as many people doing iOS work on weekends?

I previously explored putting a banner ad on several members of the BuySellAds network only to find that with the kind of budget I can muster I can forget about achieving any noticeable effect. If anything, my traffic only moves up by adding additional interesting posts. That’s the “Keep Writing” part of Matt Gemmell’s recently fireballed piece SEO for Non-dicks.

I need more incoming links, as Matt put it  as “Incoming Links are good”, I previously also alluded to that in You Can Thank Me. So how can I get these without having to pay for them? For one thing, I am tweeting about my work as much as I can without getting on people’s nerves.

Chris’ questions gave me an idea, not an actual Layaway Plan (where you pay installments and receive the product once you paid up) but rather a trade. I will pay you $1 per 1000 impressions of this banner ad of mine on your blog.

But instead of getting actual cash you can choose from my components and licenses from my parts store. For obvious reasons that only applies to my own components, you can recognize them by the prefixed DT.

Chris has around 2000 visitors a day too, so that means for putting up my banner until end of year it is only fair that I will let him have the DTBannerManager component he so craves.

I am also looking for writers that would be interested in trading their first publishing rights of articles for code. It would work such that I would pay you a good rate for articles and you could trade in this money the same way.  I cannot promise any specifics here, I need to see it first. After I published your work as guest author on Cocoanetics there is a certain period after which you are free to offer the article to other blogs or publish it on your own.

There might be other possibilities of trades as well, depending on what you can offer. Anything that adds content or traffic to Cocoanetics is of interest to me. It never hurts to ask. I am open to suggestions.

Google AdWords wanted me to have another look at their offering and gave me a credit for 100 Euros to spend on their ad network. At the same time I put exactly the same banner ad on 3 sites that I found when browsing the BuySellAds list of publishers. Also I’ve had several customers for putting ads on the Cocoanetics site, one app, and three ads for two components.

Let’s have a look at the numbers to see if we cannot figure out some feel for the varying effectiveness.

This was the banner that I used, it was created by a designer friend of mine. He’s available for affordable contract work, to get in contact with him, just e-mail me.

Let’s start with the biggest player …

AdWords: Just Words

First of all it took several days for anything to happen even though I correctly set up the ad campaign on the AdWords website. I had green lights all around, but still the ads would not show. It was only when I opened a ticket with Google that suddenly they started to appear. I got an annoying request to fill out a service evaluation survey before and after the response.

This is actually the second campaign that disappointed my on Adwords. The first one was for an app that I collaborated on with Andreas Heck. Both campaigns were using a big leaderboard ad banner.

App Campaign: 895175 impressions … 609 clicks (CTR 0.07%) … €732.85 = CPC €1.20, CPM €1.22

Site Campaign: 82803 impressions … 163 clicks (CTR 0.20%) … €99.00 = CPC €1.64, CPM €0.84

Did this additional traffic gain us anything?

Well, the app did still run at a loss and I cannot really say that I see any impact on my site traffic. So it’s all been just a very big waste of money. Google has the advantage of having the biggest market share in advertising networks on the internet. But I’m coming to the conclusion that their hyped content targeting algorithms are not what they are cracked up to be. Any non-automatic method of placement gets better click through rates than what Google achieves.

Maybe the story will be different if you have thousands of Euros to sink into AdWords, or even better tens of thousands of Euros. Because below that you will not get any benefit except the expense.

BuySellAds: Brain Required

I recently switched to BuySellAds.com for managing the ads on my site, as Google AdSense (the counterpart to AdWords) did not make me more than a few dollars per month. BSA is specifically catering to small and medium sized independent site owners. Medium traffic sites can get their rates switched to CPM. Small traffic sites like mine are in the default mode of a set price. You can still affect the CPC by allowing several banners in the same placement, for example if you have two banner sold for a spot then each will get half of the impressions.

I put the same banner on three positions BSA is managing, here are the numbers so far:

Ray Wenderlich iOS Tutorials (CPM): 11563 impressions … 113 clicks (CTR 0.64%) … $14.45 = CPC $0.13, CPM $1.25

CutViews – Apple News ($10 per 30 days): 11082 impressions … 11 clicks (CTR 0.10%) … $3.00 = CPC $0.27, CPM $0.27

iPhone 4 Simulator ($10 per 30 days): 6013 impressions … 17 clicks (CTR 0.28%) … $3.00 = CPC $0.17, CPM $0.50

The daily amounts are prorated for 9 days out of 30. I spent $75 on Ray’s site for a percentage of his impressions, which are listed as 285000 per month as of now. What also strikes me is that I received like 10 times as many click-throughs on Ray’s site than from CutViews. I can only assume that this is because of the different interests of visitors. Somebody interested in Apple News might not be an iOS developer, but people visiting Ray’s site almost definitely are, or might be contemplating a career change.

If these additional visitors will actually increase overall traffic at my site remains to be seen. But at least I did not need to spend the amounts of money that Google got from me to find out. I used only funds that I previously made by SELLING ads and tweets via BuySellAds. So my actual cost was zero, but I still might be reaping a long term benefit.

The Verdict

Being able to browse and specifically select a site where the audience fits your own agenda has proven to be a major advantage of BuySellAds over Google AdWords. It does not pay however to just select any cheap site there. You definitely have to focus your efforts, otherwise you get clicks that are cheap, but you also don’t get very many of these.

The sweet spot seems to be around a $1.25 CPM, while trying to get the highest CTR that you possibly can by designing your ad to speak to the interests of the audience of the site you put the ad on. Ray’s iOS game tutorial site is definitely in the same niche as my business, and so a CTR of more than half a percent is apparently the highest I was able to achieve with all the best ingredients.

At the same time this once again proves that banner ads for apps generally fail to connect with the majority of people. Ads for apps don’t work. At least not if you hope to increase your sales dramatically. This is just not within reach for us people with limited budgets.

Having said that, I see that the advertisers on my site are getting even greater value than I was able to achieve myself via the methods described above.

The Today Todo task management app by Spielhaus is seeing a CTR of 0.99% on the frontpage. SixStorage a cloud-sync component is getting 0.98%. Superpin tried two places. On all the articles they got 0.69% CTR, but this was too little for them, so they cancelled it and the spot will fall to the next one purchasing it. On the parts store pages they are getting 1.45% CTR which is amazing by any standard.

Then there’s another option you have with BuySellAds that does not exist on Google: Sponsored Tweets. For a mere $15 per tweet you get your message quickly in front of 2600 people. Typical click-throughs for any of my tweets are between 100 and 200. A couple of people have previously tested this mechanism and found to be getting about the same amount of traffic as my regular tweets. That’s a cost per click of less than $0.15, well below what any ad banner could give you.

Conclusion

I encourage you to be picky about the sites that you advertise on with BSA and forget about Google, they want your money, but they cannot give you the value that you are looking for. If you have some money to spend on ads then find websites on BSA that match your product. The big sites are well funded already, rather give your money to the smaller independent ones, which might be run as a hobby and are looking for just enough ad income to pay for the costs of the site.

And think carefully if it wouldn’t make more sense of sponsoring a couple of tweets to stir up some immediate response to – say – the launch of your app. All ad options on Cocoanetics.com are listed here.

Over the last few days I did my first TweetAway, from Tweeting and Giveaway. Let’s examine the cost versus the benefit, if it turns out that this was worthwhile then we should do it more often in the future. Let’s look at the stats from bit.ly and twittercounter to see what this gained Cocoanetics.

The first thing that captures the imagination is the prize. You should choose something that gets people excited. Not necessarily something that does not cost you anything. Everybody knows that copies of your own software don’t cost you anything. So there’s no incentive for people to participate. Rather pick something that has some intrinsic value unrelated to your core business. Consider it a marketing expense. Instinctively we are constantly weighing cost versus benefit. Why would I risk looking like a raffle whore to my followers if the prize is not of sufficient value to offset that?

The main aim of a TweetAway is to grow your influence. This is achieved via growing your Twitter followership as well as get people to notice your website and possibly increase traffic there as well. Therefore I announced the raffle on my blog explaining to users how to participate. The tweet contained a bit.ly shortlink, to facilitate tracking of clickthroughs. Some Twitter clients replaced that with their own short link, but bit.ly’s stats also account for these. You get to the stats page for any bit.ly or j.mp link just by appending a +.

For the tweet to have some potential effect it has to be recursive, i.e. point back to the article explaining why it makes sense to tweet it. And at the same time it has to contain a message that tells followers of the tweeter why this specific twitter account might be of interest to them. Otherwise you would only get people playing, but their followers would see it as spam. In the best case each such tweet following the formula would cause several new people to follow the mentioned @cocoanetics account and themselves participate in the raffle.

You also see two spikes on the above chart. The first one was from the original tweet that announced the blog post. Later such spikes might come from people stumbling about the blog post directly and then also wanting to participate. This is why you have to give the whole raffle some time to simmer, like a week seems perfect. On my Google Analytics you barely notice the effect of 336 visits to the article. If you wanted to interpret something into that, then there’s an overall slight decrease of the weekly peaks and weekend dips staying about constant. The reason for this I suspect to be in the lack of time I had to produce more coding related articles over the past month or so.

Even without this raffle followership of @cocoanetics would steadily grow, hopefully mostly due to developers following and not spambots. BTW: There I have the rule of immediately reporting them to the authorities, i.e. Twitter via the built-in functionality, and I hope you’re doing the same. Organic grow of followership for this account is 5.3 per day. Since the beginning of the raffle this increased to 9.75 per day. This means that 84% more people are following @cocoanetics than before the raffle.

Here’s the 3 month chart from TwitterCounter.com.

More detailed and more visually pleasing are the charts you get from TwentyFeet.com also for free:

TwentyFeet also shows you two additional metrics: on how many lists you are and how many followers you lost. So besides of the clearly visible steepening of the red line (followers) you can also see the green line (listed) to turn into an upswing after plateauing for a while. And the turquoise line (followers lost) shows somewhat of a decreasing trend. So generally the result can only be judged as very favorable.

It remains to be seen whether these new followers will immediately unfollow after the conclusion of the raffle, but I like to think that there’s method to my madness: I keep personal tweets on my German personal account and the Cocoanetics tweets are relevant to iOS developers with some tangents mixed in that have in the least something to do with the Mac/iOS ecosystem.

I used the free service of TweetAways.com to facilitate the drawing. By linking it to your Twitter account you receive an API key via direct message. This key, your account name and the winning phrase are all you need to have them randomly select a winner. Immediately upon hitting the “Pick a winner!” button you receive a DM informing you that the drawing might take a couple of minutes. Then you receive an @reply with the name of the winner.

For this drawing I entered the entire “payload” of the tweet as the winning phrase, since only complete tweets should be eligible to play. This was the text I set in bold.

Portal 2 Giveaway by @cocoanetics (BTW a great source for iOS dev info): http://bit.ly/g5nsKG #raffle

So there were 26 participants which matches up with the bit.ly stats which also shows all tweets leading to the same page. Some people worried that their “ticket” would have been too old, but by the looks of things TweetAways captured all the tweets they should have.

One in 26 were really good odds to be winning here, compared to other raffles. Having 1% of your followers participate might sound low, but in most areas a conversion rate of 1% is considered high. Our happy winner is Sam Grover, iOS developer at Small Society. Congratulations, Sam!

Sending the prize to the winner is easy on Steam. You have a window that has all your guest passes and gifts. From there you can either e-mail the gift or directly send it to a Steam ID.

Now here a bit of advice that I can only give because I got cheated myself. I found it odd that somebody contacted me with a Twitter name that was only off by one character. This guy had actually copied Sam’s twitter profile to the letter. At first I found it a bit odd, but I was so excited to have the winner respond to me that this oddity did not ring any alarm bell. I even asked this person why there were two twitter accounts and he told me that this is because he did not want to reveal some personal account info. My brain must have been shut down.

Well, you learn. Because it was my own painful mistake I purchased another copy of Portal 2 and sent it to the correct Sam Grover. Only send the prize to the exact winning address regardless of what great stories you are being told.

Conclusion

TweetAways are a fun and engaging practice that can get more people to notice you and your services. For them to be successful you have to consider these rules:

1. Select a Prize that is likely to be coveted amongst your target audience.
2. Publish the TweetAway participation rules in a blog post
3. Construct a tweet that contains a trackable short link to this post and to-the-point description of what this raffle is about
4. Get the tweet out to at least 2000 followers to achieve some critical mass. Consider sponsoring tweets on accounts with sufficient followership.
5. Add a marketing payload to the message, that would be the twitter account for easy following and a statement why this account is of interest.
6. Give the raffle a week time to cook, some people will find the blog post via your website and also want to participate
7. Use a transparent process to perform the drawing of a winner.
8. Perform due diligence when handing out the prize to the winner to make sure you are sending it to only the true winner.

I’m happy with my general results and I will definitely do something similar again soon once a good prize presents itself. I encourage you to also do an occasional tweetaway like described here because I think that it adds great value and interaction to your Twitter activities. If you need a conduit to get the word out to 2500 iOS developers, sponsor a tweet to get your own TweetAway going.

“This was a triumph. I’m making a note here: ‘huge success’. It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction” – Still Alive, the Portal title song.

And then another Portal opened … (Update May 1st)

I contacted Steam support and asked them nicely if there has any way to get the stolen gift back. At first they offered me a refund, but I told them that I love Portal 2 and want to keep playing it. But then they surprised me and told me that they had credited one Portal 2 gift to my account.

This can mean only one thing for you: another raffle! And somewhat suitable to do that since @cocoanetics is just about to cross 2600 followers. Since you’re probably anxious to get playing in Co-op mode with me, I’ll have this raffle last for the next 24 hours only. Here’s the text to tweet:

Another Portal 2 gift materialized! @cocoanetics is giving away a copy. Follow and retweet to participate! http://bit.ly/fXRAdN #raffle

Good luck!

Let me share the results we got with different kinds of banner advertisements and what we learned from this experiment.

Front Page

Let’s first inspect the results from placing ads on the site frontpage, the page you see if you go directly to cocoanetics.com.

This was for the camThis! app and liked right to the iTunes address. I love the production value of the ad, it has a bit of a geeky Portal game quality. Though if it weren’t for the statement that this app is about “streaming live to everyone” then it might be hard to instinctively know what this app is about just from glancing at the graphics.

I went digging into my Google Analytics outbound links, but I could not find a single click through. That’s the rock bottom of ad failures. To be fair, a major contributing factor might have been the placement on the front page. People coming from Google searches generally end up on an individual article page related to their search query. For somebody to get to the homepage to see this app he would have to go to my site directly. That’s 7.15% of traffic. Of these 150 people how many do you think would be looking for a video streaming app. Very few.

It dawned on me that for an ad to be successful on Cocoanetics.com it would have to have a context with the topics that are of interest to iOS developers. That’s why I had higher hopes for this ad for nKey, a Brazilian iOS development outfit. Again, we see high production value in terms of graphics, but the lack of a clear call to action or message. And psychologically the grid in the background might be seen as a metaphor of a strategy “full of holes”.

This kind of ad is what professionals call an “image advertisement”. The aim of these is not to get a click-through, but instead have people associate a certain message or quality with the company and it’s logo. Image Ads are usually done by large brands like Coca Cola and they are only effective indirectly and if done en masse.

If this indeed was the intention of nKey then they have achieved one thing: not getting click-throughs. We cannot measure however whether more people will now subconsciously think of nKey when looking for “Brazilian iOS Development”. It would have been smarter to drop the info on Brazil as this would probably trigger certain fearful instincts and instead focus on some concrete offerings. Something like “we can build your app before you even know what it is”. Or “free app feasability analyis”, or something else that makes us lust for more information and promises instant gratification.

Article Pages

First let’s have a look at the ads that were placed at the MORE break on app pages of this blog. With daily unique visitors around 1500 generally looking for specific articles this ad would be seen by the most people.

The first and longest running advertisement was for the Cyberspace browser app. In retrospect I was rather successful, probably because of the attractive imagery, and pushing several buttons of us iOS geeks. Cyberspace. Space. Something special.

The campaign was extended once and in total we tracked 68 unique click throughs over a period of 2 months. We terminated it mostly because there was too little tangible effect on app downloads.

After 2 weeks of interim Google ads a new campaign was started, this time for ScoreEuchre, an app to keep track of Euchre Scores (I think). Since it was in the middle of a month I added another month at no extra charge. Though what a disappointment this was.

One month since this started we only have 19 unique clicks. That got me to stop and ponder a bit what the cause for this big difference of effectivity could be. Why would an ad with the exact same placement gather only half as many clicks?

It might have to do with the copy and design of the banner. If you step back and feel for your first impression mine is that it’s somehow blurry, has like compression artifacts around the text and sort of a passive-aggressive color scheme. It does have a clear messages that this is about an app and that the developer is obviously looking for reviews, offering promo codes in exchange.

Here’s the first problem. Last time I tried to write a review on iTunes for an app I had gotten via promo code I wasn’t able to. Either that was a temporary glitch or Apple has finally seen the light and only accepts reviews from people who actually paid for the app. So the first premise “Promo Code for Reviews” is out, if this refers to iTunes reviews.

The second premise is even less attractive. For I while I offered promo codes to all of my apps via a prominently displayed text ad at the top of every page. This was literally seen by thousands of visitors, but only occasionally somebody would actually ask me for a promo code. Developers seem to be quick in making up their mind about the worth of other developer’s apps. And if we like these apps we usually don’t pinch pennies but pay the price. Gratification, even more instant than via promo code, because these codes you have to request, copy/paste, etc. Buying an app you like is just a click and one password away. And another thing, developers are developers, not writers. I am the exception to the rule as I love to put my thoughts into writing. But I know of very few developers who are actively nurturing a blog, let alone put reviews up for other people’s work.

Lastly and most importantly, what is this Euchre? Some sort of card game. Sorry for my ignorance, but I have never played this game. And also I know of no body who does. It’s definitely a niche product for a niche different from my target audience.

Sponsored Tweets?

I find from my bit.ly stats that any kind of article will get between 100 and 200 click throughs. Which is an order of magnitude higher than the number of click throughs that banners will gather over the course of a month. I’ve yet to get any sort of stats what the benefit is for sites that I send traffic to by recommending them to my 2500 followers.

To simplify the process for myself I moved away from manual ads and instead implemented the BuySellAds.com system. Have a look at the index to see the currently available placements. There you now also have the option of buying sponsored tweets.

I have no idea if and how this might work out, but maybe you can be the first to purchase an ad there, so that we see if it works?

Learnings

For an ad to be effective on Cocoanetics.com it needs to chime with the geeky core values of the average iOS developer. Saving time. Getting things done. Social recognition. Niche Knowledge. Getting good at your craft.

People coming to Cocoanetics do so because for the most part they are looking for solutions to their everyday iOS development problems. They don’t appear to be looking for other developer’s apps, because they are making their own. Also they are not looking for promo codes, as there are better suited places to cater to the market of developer’s desperate to get more exposure.

To sum it up in one sentence I’m offering this: “an ad for your product and service only makes sense to put on a site if you have a good indication that this site’s target audience might also be interested in it”. One word: Demographics.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to display your banners any time, but I am interested that you get maximum bang for your buck. You’ve seen that ads that developer’s make themselves range in production value, but generally fail to transport a clear message and “call to action”. It definitely has a big impact if you have a professional graphic artist design your ad banner.

The European market is only large when viewed as a union, but due to a multitude of different languages it is unlikely that you’ll see iAd coming there next. Apple will probably continue rolling out their network but focus on English-language markets first: Canada, Australia, New Zealand etc. Lately I’ve been getting around $0.18 per click on iAds.

Click-through payments from AdMob are way lower compared to that, about $0.0225 per click. The reason being that AdMob typically serves small-budget developers, guys just like us, who just don’t have the kind of budgets that Apple managed to acquire for their current two markets.

BUT, a solution to this dilemma literally found me. Newly founded MobFox, their home in the Austrian capital Vienna, aims to fill what the other big networks leave to be desired. MobFox concentrates on the D, A, CH markets which share German as their common language. Their idea is similar to iAd, namely to acquire mid-size to large advertisers via agencies. Currently they have several advertising campaigns that pay around 12 Euro-Cents per click, which is in the same league as iAds.

When the MobFox CEO approached me to win me over to try their network I met him at their headquarters, a small office near the bustling Mariahilfer Street, Vienna’s most visited shopping street. I explained to him what we European developers really need and told him about DTBannerManager and how I could add it there as a third network. Then we parted ways.

A few days later I set up my first mobile app to be able to download the SDK. But I was shocked! The documentation was incomplete and partially altogether incorrect, mentioning class names that didn’t exist and telling me to set my publisher id via a #define which does not have any effect because this only works at compile time. In short, this SDK was utter crap.

So I offered to rewrite it to make it usable and less confusing which was gladly accepted. About 14 coding hours later I had created a universal MobFox.framework. I modeled it after the iAd.framework, except for a delegate method to get the publisher ID, which I implemented similar to what AdMob did. Amongst all the improvements were:

• Hiding superflous and unusable methods from the developer to avoid confusion.
• Make all web requests carry the appropriate user-agent string: “MobFox/3.0 (iPhone)”
• Add capability to refresh Ads after time set on server
• Allow for tel, sms, iTunes and other internally supported URLs as ad click-through URLs
• Allow the developer to steer via online dashboard if he wants to show ads in an in-app ad browser or in Safari.
• Embed graphics into the binary so that you don’t risk forgetting to copy these into your project as well
• Ability to probe the click-through URL to see if it redirects to an external app. This way tap throughs are tracked but the user does not get an additional white safari page pop up but is immediately forwarded to the external app, like app store.
• Proper error handling and communicating of resolution steps to developer

We documented two methods on how to add the framework to your app, either via Interface Builder or in code. In the least you have to implement the delegate method to provide your publisher id, which is unique per mobile app that you set up on the MobFox dashboard. The “advanced” demo shows how you can easily slide in an ad if you receive one or hide it if you don’t.

I’m really proud of what I created. The new MobFox SDK framework is clean, efficient and easy to implement in your own apps. I would like to encourage you to try it out. I’ll add it to several apps of mine over the coming weeks and I’ll report back once I have facts about all 3 networks to compare.

I have also included MobFox as an additional option in DTBannerManager; all you have to do there is to fill in your publisher ID in the config file. I believe the optimal strategy to be: try iAD first, then try MobFox, else go with AdMob. This gets you the highest paying ads for US/UK, D/A/CH and everywhere else we fall back to AdMob.

For a limited time only I am also able to get the threshold adjusted what an ad must pay for it to be served to you. This way you can pick out the cherries while still receiving ads from other networks. Send me an e-mail if you add MobFox to any app and I’ll get this set up for you.

The times mentioned on this chart (Games/Trivia US) are central European time zone and document the last 13 hours. You can clearly see the jump in sales rank 11 hours ago with a steady movement toward the “visible sweetspot”.

The sweetspot is to achieve a rank no lower than 20 because this is when the app becomes visible on the “Top Paid Apps” bar on the left side of iTunes. The theory goes that this will dramatically increase the number of impulse purchases just because now the app is seen and on rank 21 or below it is not. A promotion that does not push your app into the visibility zone has to be considered failed.

The experiment in this case has been done be handing over 30 promo codes to AppGiveaway, letting them organize the promotion in terms of selecting random winners. Michael analyzed the hourly sales rank while leaning back. Hourly ranking updates where only recently introduced as “Pro” option on Applyzer.com in case you did not notice.

From the chart above we can roughly estimate that 1 free download = 1 position better. But that is only true for a seemingly non-popular category like Games/Trivia or Games/Word. Ranking Positions in the much coveted Action and Racing categories are much tighter spaced meaning that the number of promocodes you would have to “spend” to make your rank move is way higher. So high in fact that I cannot recommend this approach at all.

Promo Codes are much better spent on friendly bloggers who can give an in depth review of your app because the blog article will stick around and probably affect sales numbers long term as opposed to a “the giveaway has ended” making users feel sad because they missed out on a chance to get something for free.

It is generally agreed that Lite versions help you maintain visibility which giving a jumpboard off which to “upsell” to the paid version. Last time I checked a good conversion rate was considered to be slightly better than 1 percent, so the top 20 presence of LuckyWheel Lite in several countries probably has a much bigger long term effect than any kind of promotion or hype. For some wondrous reason (maybe because of the lovely Spanish localization?) LuckyWheel Lite is glued to number one in Games/Word in Spain for several weeks now.

Still all that fame has yet failed to make us rich. Review blogs have generally ignored our app which brings up thoughts of the review article system being generally rigged anyway. Or how can you explain away the unfair advantage that makers of app can reap who manage to get an “in” with TUAW?

A game might have a globally visible a free version, but you still wont make more than a couple of dollars from it. The explanation I managed to come up with is that the big dollars are burried in the top spots of the biggest categories on the biggest markets. Which are? USA of course as you can see on a very detailed article of MarkJ.

To cut a long story short these are my ideas for boosting your sales rank:

• Do Give-Aways only if you can hope to reach top 20 in your app’s category with it. Otherwise don’t.
• Find friendly bloggers who will trade a promo code for a review.
• Have a Lite version of your app available to generate conversion sales and stay visible long term.
• Consider moving from a category where you rank badly to a not-so-tight category.
• Use a tool like Applyzer.com to see what works for you.

Generating visibility that sticks will be more valuable to you long-term than hoping to strike it rich just because you gave away 30 copies of something.

THIS JUST IN: One hour ago Apple revealed on their quarterly conference call discussing earnings that they are working on a new ranking system whereby no longer the number of units downloaded are considered but rather the amount of money that an app is able to pull it. Clearly this is more interesting because then you will directly know who is making more money then you. One side effect that Apple and developers can hope for is that then it will be possible once more to compete on quality as opposed to simply competing on who can survive off a 99 Cents sales price.

When I put it on the store for free the downloads skyrocketed only to crack on 0 as soon as I set the price to tier 1. That’s where sales stayed for many months, mostly 0, on some days as high as $2 in revenue. MyAppSales tells me that the daily average was around $1.50 in royalties from GeoCorder.

Enter AdMob. Andreas Heck of Super Trumps fame told me about his positive experience with integrating AdMob ads in his products, so I felt compelled (or shall I say envious) if his earnings. I made a couple of improvements of the GeoCorder codebase and added a new target that would display one AdMob cell in the table that shows the recorded tracks. As usual Apple wanted to play ball, so it went back and forth until finally GeoCorder [FREE] hit the store on June 7th.

To clarify: GeoCorder and GeoCorder [FREE] are identical in terms of code and functionality. GeoCorder is tier 1, [FREE] is free and has one ad.

I’ve been watching closely what the effect on income from the GeoCorder asset would be and here is my analysis after 2 weeks. The purple line shows the daily income from paid GeoCorder. In blue you see the AdMob revenue. The black dashed line is the total.

There are a couple of interesting observations that can made from the above chart. Judging from the red line which shows free units you can see that after an initial peak unit downloads are constantly degressing. Already on the third day ads surpassed downloads. This probably means that some previous customers stick around and use the app and this adds to the new users of the day. So far this mades out to be 100 ads more shown than there are downloads on one day.

For the first week of having both apps in the race Ad revenue surpassed the income from the paid version easily. But in the second week something unexpected happend. Suddenly unit sales of the 1$-variant began to shoot up in turn overtaking the ad revenue.

The dotted line is the one that gives me the most pleasure. It’s the total income from both GeoCorders and it trippled the income that I had before this AdMob experiment going from $2 max to hitting $6 yesterday.

These numbers refute the theory that an Ad-sponsored free version of your app might canibalize your paid variant. The opposite is true. Not only can your customers try out your app without risk, additionally the iPhone ad platform has increadible click-through rates of 30% and more. As a rule of thumb you get one dollar per hundred downloads.

Courtesy of Applyzer we can also see how this exercise affected sales. I like to use United States as it is by far the largest market and thus gives us a more significant statistical sample.

After a strong entrance up to rank 45 in the photography category GeoCorder [FREE] shows the typical slow downward slide. But way more inportant is the effect this had on paid GeoCorder’s rank. Starting around rank 600 GeoCorder shows a faster upward trend knocking on 200 in the navigation category.

If you’re asking yourself why one is in the navigation and one is the photography category … I asked myself the same question. So I went into iTunes Connect and fixed it. Not being amongst the top 1000 in the travel or utilities category anywhere means I can axe them.

Those $100 a month that I am now making with the GeoCorders will not make me rich. But with an increase in income like this I am three times more likely to add a couple of features every once in a while. If you are using it I am happy to hear any feature suggestions you might have.

In summary I can say that AdMob has trippled my income from an app that had lackluster sales at best to a level where it makes sense to spend a few hours each month to make further improvements.