AdMob statistics

Unity Engine
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1

I’ve found this nice thread on the iOS forum, and I think it may be of help something similar here for Android.

I’m totally newbie about ad revenue, even if I know the system since year 2000.
So, I have no idea of the numbers around nowadays but I’m nearly ready to publish a game.
We are in beta version, and I would like to understand if the rigth model to monetize our game is selling it for 1$ or 2$ or placing a banner in there.

IMHO the most important data, which looks to be a total secret, is in my opinion how many impressions you need to make 1$.
I couldn’t find this info on the AdMob site (which is, in all honesty, very very weak), so I started to search the internet.
Blogs. News. Stats.
No way.
I came into an explicit data in a single post of a blog or forum (can’t remember now).
A user wrote that he earned 0.42$ with 1000 impressions.
To make counts round, I’d put it like you need 2500 impressions to earn 1$.

The excuse to not talk about this number looks to be that it is extremely variable based on the type of ads and how many CTR and some other factors.
But there MUST be an “upper limit” and a “lower limit” and a general average.
Having these datas at hand is essential to decide to go ads or commercial IMHO.

Now, that’s a SINGLE data so I would like to have a larger base of witness about this number… is it reliable?
Is it often less?
Is it more?

2

I honestly can tell you that I am extremely disappointed with admobs reliability. The reporting seems extremely off. One place it tells me one thing, in another something else entirely.
Let me give some examples:

I have two apps up running admobs.
#1:
Revenue: $.34
Requests: 11,190
eCPM: $0.03
Fill Rate: 93.32%
RPM: $0.03

#2
Revenue: $2.31
Requests: 12,572
eCPM: $0.36
Fill Rate: 51.48%
RPM: $0.18

I should note that the first app has house ads turned on, meaning when there isn’t an ad to fill, it uses one I created for the other app, that is why the fill rate is so much higher. On the other hand, it is very misleading, and I’m actually only guessing that, because when I asked admob about it, I never received a response. I’ve made two seperate requests about other things to their customer service, and have never had a response.

That’s not my point, though. I have a few problems with them besides the lack of customer support.
The first is, if you total the requests between the two apps, it is 23,762. On another part of their site, they list how many requests have been made, broken down by country. In the US alone, they list 28,995. No idea how that is possible, or which numbers are correct.
Second, look at the numbers given by the iAds guys. They’re making quite a bit higher percentage than admobs is giving. One guy listed his app had 3,867 requests, and had made $8.30 with a 9.9% fill rate. That means with 383 impressions, about 1/40th of the actual impressions from my apps, he had made more than 3 times as much.

It doesn’t add up, and they don’t seem to want to talk to anyone about it. If you look at their google groups page, a lot of people have complained about late payments. Also, everyone’s fill rate seems to have plummeted since the new year, which I can also attest to.

So, overall, I’m looking for a new solution for the future. I’m pretty disappointed overall with Admob.

3

Oh, and to answer the question about how many requests it takes to make $1, I’ve never actually seen money come in unless there has been a click. Honestly, I don’t have a high traffic app, so it could be that you have to hit so many filled ads before you see revenue, but from my experience, they seem to be going more by the clicks than by the views.

4

Thank you very very much for your report, Ben.

From the outside, I can say that my first impression is that, to have some revenue with impressions, you REALLY have to have a lot of impressions.

Another factor that I think is important is the number of different clients are actually seeing your ads.
If you can add for app 1 and 2 how many many times they were downloaded, your datas would be more coherent.
Because showing and reshowing the same ad to the same client will not value as much as showing it to different clients.

Also, another impression is that the number of impressions matter really low if you have low clickthrough, and they become more and more valuable if you have clickthrough. I think that the clickthrough is taken by these agencies as a factor to check if the ads are really seen or are misplaced and invisible.
And this is quite a right reasoning: if nobody clicks, either the game/app never allow users to click (in example during a racing game you have no time to do it) or the banner is not visible enough.
So, the formula to calculate an impression value could be something like (n.impressions * (n.clickthrough * n.clickthrough)) so that we have a curve that enhances more and more the impressions value based on the number of clickthroughs.

Also, I think that to earn money you must have something like from 100000 impressions up every day.
Then you will start to have clicks and impressions will earn values.
But of course this is just a feeling I have after I have read a lot of threads, posts, blogs and so on around.

On the other hand, if you checked the thread I linked, you can see that some guys are really making money with iAds (not sure about AdMob), so there must be some way to earn money from our productions.

In an ultimate analysis, I can say that I find really unfair to don’t know how the revenue is calculated and I’m not sure it’s perfectly “legal” or “moral” to allow this type of behave around.
These agencies are actually selling a service on which they can pay you from 0 to unknown and you will never know what are they paying you for.
I really hope a class action will be set up soon because this lack of transparency is inadmissible and this is a great menace to transparency for online business.
I wonder how it is nobody started a class action yet. I can say that if I had let’s say 10 games or websites or such on, and a consolidate community/blog, I had started this action much time ago.

5

The stats for my apps (aproximately 300 total downloads so far and 100 active installs, and without house ads) :

Revenue : $0.30
Requests : 7638
eCPM : $0.08
Fill Rate : 46.44 %
RPM : $0.04

did you notice the Admob Common Publisher Terms ?

6

This means you need 23000 impressions to make around 1$.
But you have a very very low clickthrough, so this may have a heavy influence on impressions value.

7

Thanks guys, you have made my mind up to definitely go out there as a paid app. Because then if you get 300 downloads at least you get 300*(cost-commission) paid into your account.

A small working out on an average game price of £1.49 means that you would make approximately £357 from 300 sales after 20% commission. How many ad impressions is it to make the same return? Obviously that depends on the eCPM/RPM and the frequency of people actually playing your game/app. But based on the example above the impression count is 8,211,000 to achieve £357 heheheheheeeeee. If only we all had Angry Birds in our portfolio.

I have always been dubious about ad networks and this just about sums my suspicions up… then again you don’t get anything in life for ‘free’ maybe we should all remember that.

8

Try to check the income some people realized on the thread I posted above, this may give you back some doubts :smile:

9

I wrote a blog entry on our experience publishing Crazy Snowboard on Android that you might be interested in reading here: Adventures in Android-Land

Here’s the latest Admob data for “Crazy Snowboard” for the last 30 days:

Revenue: $2,066.99
eCPM: $0.29
Requests: 7,457,152
Impressions: 7,142,018
Fill Rate: 95.77%
CTR: 0.61%

We’ve got house ads turned on.

10

Yeah, looks like you can actually live on that :slight_smile:
But of course it must be good stuff.

What are “house ads”?

And you boys shouldn’t ever think to live out of one game.
Not all are such lucky Angry Birds producers :smile:

11

Just out of interest ezone - how many installs do you have to generate 7,457,152 impressions per month?

I am looking at integrating admobs into my first game but not sure whether to go through the pain of adding them or just doing the paid app route.

Also it seems my calculation was wildly incorrect on my previous post so thank you for setting the record straight with some factual information ;D

12

We have a total 385,844 installs - Google Marketplace rankings #34 free games, #8 free arcade action games.

Yes, it is a tough call whether to go paid or ad-supported free. In the end we decided if going free was good enough for Angry Birds, then it’s good enough for us! However, when converting our iOS version of Crazy Snowboard to Android by far the most development time spent was in getting admob working (mainly because I knew pretty much zip about java). The good news is that once you’ve done it once it is virtually a no-brainer adding it to future titles.

Make sure you check out this thread to get admob working: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/67817-I-will-pay-someone-to-show-me-how-to-integrate-admob

13

At beginning of this month my app (Dora the explorer - the kids memory game) entered the top free list and started to earn from 15$ to 25$ every day at fill rate close to 35%. It was continuing till 8 of Jan and suddenly dropped to 3-4$ per day, when the the fill rate is 6-7%.
It is not clear for me why the fill rate is so low. Other my apps that have a less requests has hight fill rate of 95-99%. Why the strong apps do not have hight fill rate?

14

As I wrote: that’s almost incredible that there is no class action against this transparency issue… they can say ANYTHING about datas, you must trust them at all and have no way to check if they are honest or not.

15

Revenue: $9.39
Req: 7,840
eCPM: $1.20
fill rate: 99.99%
RPM: $1.20

at airpush.com i get an eCPM of around 2.5$…

16

Hey guys ,I have Admob on my Crazy Racer game and I have just hit 30,000 DLs with 8,000 still installed but My admob says I have earnt zero lol ,I guess my plugin is setup wrong ?or is this normal ? please:)

17

Something is wrong with your admob setup, there should be some figures for 30K downloads.

18

I guessed ,I shall have to try and figure it out ,to be honest tho I am thinking of dropping it From ANdroid alltogether from all the negative admob posts I have heard and Just selling it on IOS and WIndows for maybe £2 a throw :frowning:

19

I am also a proper Javanoob lol ,yesterday I realised I have it set for Arm7 only (thanks to some golden advice ^^ ) turns out I have more than halved my Market availiabilty lol .Well For IOS and WIndows THAT bit I wont have to worry about lol …

20

yay Admob working ,46.000 DLs 9,000 installed still but earnt £9 lol ,I guess paid apps are the only way to go lol ,time to buy an Apple Mac I guess