Advertising Your Applications

First, there is a difference between marketing and advertising, and it’s important to understand the distinction. The premise of this article is about how to market your iPhone/iPad apps which is a process and includes multiple steps. Part of the marketing process includes a single component known as advertising.

Advertising, in the iPhone/iPad sense, is concerned with the placement of ads on the iPhone or iPad itself to either help sell your application or to generate revenue selling other apps or products. A developer can make money selling their application to interested buyers or by selling space on their application to host other ads.

Typically, a developer who wants to make money selling ad space on their application will provide a free application to encourage thousands of downloads. They will carry ads on their application with the hope that the iPhone/iPad user will click on one of their hosted ads. Each click pays the owner of the free application a percentage of the revenue generated for each ad.

Therefore, developers of free apps are incented to develop the very best apps possible to achieve huge volumes of downloads, thus increasing the potential that someone will click through on one of their hosted ads.

There are at least six major vendors vying for ad revenue in the iPhone/iPad ad market. Two such companies have taken center stage in early 2010, Admob and Mobclix, who are considered dominant players in this space. There’s no doubt that mobile advertising is big business and getting bigger every month. Analysts peg the market to grow to $1.3 billion by 2013 up from $68 million in 2010.

Just like any type of advertising, it’s important to determine how effective it might be for your particular needs in selling your application. In most cases the shotgun advertising approach does not work and you end up spending a lot of money and don’t reach your target audience. Mobile advertising is certainly more targeted (to mobile users), but the challenge is reaching your type of application buyer. Just because someone has an iPhone or iPad does not mean they are your target audience. So, you have to understand whether the service you intend to use can target very specific users interested in your application. In the next sections we take a look at a few of the major players in the mobile ad provider market.

The other large consideration is whether to give your application away for free and try to make money by generating ad revenue.

If you choose to use a company to advertise your application, always start off with a small test before going too far and spending too much money. Just like with Google Adwords, you can set your budget low to test things out and evaluate your success.