Mobile ads are largely a money drain. Most clicks are accidental and will not lead to a sale. I'd only recommend using AdMob if you are promoting a free app and are doing a burst campaign to break into the Top 25 chart of a particular category.
Secondly, a $50 budget is peanuts and paying $0.25/click for relatively un-targeted admob clicks is crazy. We normally pay $0.05/click for such crappy traffic.
We've spent 1000's on mobile ads and it's only an effective strategy for pushing your downloads a bit higher so that you have a better chance of hitting a 'gold spot' in the charts. E.g. when you are 26th and you want to get into top 25.
I agree. The ~$0.25 CPC bid was suggested, we actually only decided to go with the suggested bid because they had warned us that demographic targeting would limit exposure.
We actually ran a similar campaign a few days previous where we had over 1,000 clicks at a .04 CPC and didn't see any increase in downloads.
Fair point. I think the lesson learned was that the targeting that we thought we were employing was not nearly as effective as we had anticipated (25-44, limited geographic area, iphone 3GS, iPhone4, iPad2).
We also were just amazed at the clicks registered in just seconds. The stat reports were already in and email alerts received in less than 2 minutes time. (Daily Budget and "Spread throughout the day" notwithstanding)
Secondly, a $50 budget is peanuts and paying $0.25/click for relatively un-targeted admob clicks is crazy. We normally pay $0.05/click for such crappy traffic.
We've spent 1000's on mobile ads and it's only an effective strategy for pushing your downloads a bit higher so that you have a better chance of hitting a 'gold spot' in the charts. E.g. when you are 26th and you want to get into top 25.