AdMob announced a new feature that will tie advertising to iPhone application downloads. Good news for developers who want to evaluate their advertising budget.
I assume that the tracking can only be done for ads served in other iPhone applications where it is possible to get the UDID and not via ads served over the mobile web. (Present theory being that they use the UDID to tie the ad to the download). I don’t believe Safari provides the iPhone UDID when you browse web pages.
I sent an email to AdMob to confirm whether it works for mobile web as well as iPhone application ads.
Also notable from the announcement is this bullet:
The App Store is an effective distribution platform for free applications. The average acquisition cost for free applications is under $1.00, significantly less than average application download costs on the PC Web.
I had to reread that three times to make sure I read it correctly. I realize there are business models where paying someone to download your free app makes sense. It’s still pretty striking to see it laid out in those terms.
I am not sure what you mean by the last paragraph. The announcement was talking about advertising and thus the cost to the app for acquiring a customer and not referring to the cost to the customer for downloading an app.
Basically, the paragraph says, “Our service is great. You only have to pay a little less than a dollar to get someone to download your application for free.” Imagine how much you had to pay before AdMob to get someone to download your FREE application.
So I understand that for some business models, free distribution makes sense. I also realize that you often need to aggressively acquire market share. I’m not disputing that AdMob is probably correct that this is a less expensive way to do so.
But I couldn’t help but think how strange it is to hear talk of how much cheaper it is to pay someone to download your free app.