Ads in Windows Phone applications

 

This weekend I had some spare time and following by a joke from a friend, I’ve made a very simple (and also very stupid) Windows Phone called “Easy Button”. It was also the first app I’ve published with my own AppHub account (previous ones – Mobitel Monitor and Ljubljana Bus were published in behalf of Microsoft Slovenia for a local competition). With that I do have access to all of the statistics, but more on that subject in a later post.

I’ve decided, that I’ll include some ads in my application, just to test things out. And also because I cannot sell apps with my account (read why in my previous post). So I’ve started to browse for ads providers – there are plenty, let me mention just a few:

• Microsoft adCenter
• admob.com
• smaato.com
• adduplex.com 
• and some more :)

First one is the most obvious and the most simple, but it useless for me, since I’m not from US. Moving right along to second one, which was also pretty good, since I can link it with my Google AdSense account. They are also providing official control for Windows Phone, so it was looking pretty cool. But… there’s a catch. Firstly, there are some technical issues with current implementation of this ad control and the worst part (for me as advertiser) – there are almost no ads for this platform and my region. With that, I’ve switched to the last one, that is AdDuplex.

This ad network allows me to show exchange ads for other apps on Windows Phone with some sponsored ads. This network is pretty new, created by Alan Mendelevich and allows my app some exposure within other apps. Like old “banner exchange” services for your own website popular about 5-6 years ago. But here’s a catch – you can also mark your app as “Monetized” which means, it will also show some commercial ads and can generate revenue. It’s not limited to a certain region (hooray for author!), payments are limited to a PayPal system.

Right now I cannot talk about success about ads, I’ll write about that in about a month or so when there will be some data available. The only thing I would like to point out is download/ads impressions ratio – which is after 4 days on marketplace 404 downloads/64 impressions. I’m not sure if that means that only 6% of people opens downloaded app or is there any other stuff that I’ve missed. I’ll share that when I’ll get more data.

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author: Aleš Rosina | Comments: 0 | Tags: wp7-ads