Yesterday, I setup a test AdMob campaign for a new site I am launching into Beta tomorrow (http://zydor.net). It is a social bookmarking and tagging site for the mobile web. You surf using a web based toolbar that let’s you tag, save and share sites. More to come on this tomorrow.

Since the site works on all phones, and is for a broad range of users, I was able to do a simple campaign with no carrier or handset targeting. The only targeting I did was to limit it to English speaking countries.

I have a long history of working with pay per click engines, and have seen my share of good and bad traffic. This is what makes or breaks them. While Google and Yahoo (Overture) have always been consistent, I have never been terribly impressed with sites like Ask.com, Looksmart,  Kanoodle, Ah-ha (remember them) and some of the others. These second tier sites always provided poor conversion rates for me.

So I did a little test to see what the mobile ad networks can do. I activated my campaign with AdMob, deposited $100, and let her rip…

Within a few hours time, I had used my $100 and had received over 1200 visitors to the mobile site. Not bad! In preparation for this, I wrote some code that would write the visitor’s information to the database. Since mobile users sometimes come from the same IP of the carrier, it is hard to really track them. I logged the Host, Host IP, the referring page and the phone user-agent so I could manually eyeball the log for info.

Here’s what I found:

• Average of 10 visitors per minute when I set the bid to .10. I could hav clearly increase that by raising the bid, and adding other countries. There is not a lack of traffic.
• Most of the traffic came from the same 3 or 4 sites. The bulk came from 1 particular site.
• Over 250,000 impressions with a click-through of approx .5%
• Out of the 1200 visitors, only 5 actually registered for the site.
• Almost all visitors were unique based on the page they came from, the user agent of the phone, the IP of the visitor. There were a few cases where I saw suspicious clicks (same phone, ip, referrer one after another), but overall there does not appear to be much click fraud.

Unfortunately, I was not able to get much information at all from the AdMob reporting, other than the total number of impressions, clicks, click-through rate, and cost.

There is so much information I want to know in order to evaluate and optimize my campaigns. Which sites performed best? What hours of the day?, Which mobile phones? What are the click-throughs based on the AdMob channels?

Without my personal tracking program, I have nothing to go by other than summary totals.

While I was impressed with the volume of traffic thrown at me, overall I was disappointed by the management interface and lack of features and reporting.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 at 10:04 am and is filed under Mobile Marketing. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.