May 2, 2014
Photos from around the world #colorbay
seen from United States
seen from Singapore
seen from Georgia
seen from Switzerland
seen from Netherlands
seen from Ukraine
seen from Uruguay
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Sri Lanka
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from Italy
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Italy
seen from China
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from United States
Photos from around the world #colorbay
An experiment in iAd
In an effort to raise awareness for our app Colorbay, we wanted to experiment with mobile ads. We decided to try iAd. We were skeptical especially because iAd has a bad reputation.
Setting up iAd
iAd is fairly simple to setup and it provides some really nice targeting options. The options provide fine grained control to target users according to gender, age, iTunes Store preferences (the type of apps your target audience downloads) and location of the user. You can also set in which category of apps you want your ad to run on and on what specific time and days you want it to run. Since our app is about photos, we chose to target users who download Photo & Video and Social Networking apps. We chose to run the ads on apps from the following categories: Photo & Video, Social Networking, Entertainment, Games, Food & Drink and Utilities. We also scheduled our ad to run on some days of the week after looking at what days our app was most used on.
Next you have to allocate the total budget, Daily Spend goal, CPC bid and CPA goal for the campaign. CPC bid is the maximum you are willing to pay for each time a user taps on your ad. CPA is the average amount you’d like to pay for each conversion your campaign achieves, i.e a user downloads the app after tapping your ad. iAd will try to match the CPA you entered, but it is not gaurenteed. You can learn more here. iAd Workbench provides an estimate of Impressions and Taps for your budget. We had decided to spend a maximum of $50 and a daily spend goal of $10 meaning that the ad will run for approximately 5 days. After tweaking around we found that a CPC and CPA of $0.40 gave us the maximum number of impressions and taps; 1,111,000 impressions and 4,400 taps.
Results
Reading around on the web, we didnt expect much from the campaign, but we were surprised. You can see the results below.
In summary, we got a total of 966,648 impressions, 1,702 taps and 25 downloads giving a CPA of $0.98 and a TTR (tap through rate) of 0.18. What's interesting is that, after the first couple of days, iAd couldn't reach the daily spend goal which means that our targeting was too specific and it couldn't show the ads. Our results are much better than what others have got. We actually got some downloads and we think it has to be due to the targeting. Also, Apple doesn't charge the full amount, they only charge how much was actually spent on the campaign.
When iAd launched, it required a minimum spend of 1 million USD which made the platform uninteresting for indie developers like us. But in WWDC 2013 when Apple reduced it to 50 USD, it caught our attention. iAd is now something feasible. We think that they are heading in the right direction and may also be a good platform to integrate with.
We are not sure what the industry standards are and how iAd compares to AdMob and others, but we are glad we did the experiment.
PS: It might be pure coincidence, but during the time the ads were running, Colorbay got featured on TechCrunch! So that's something ;)
Discussion on Hacker News
Ever since we launched Colorbay for iPad, people have been asking for an iPhone version and it is finally here. Colorbay 2.0 is a universal app which has all the great features, now specially designed for the iPhone.
Bringing Colorbay to the iPhone was a lot of work and fun. It's simple, fast and just as easy to use as the iPad version, while retaining all the features. We have some awesome new features planned for it, and we will be adding them in the coming months.
This update also brings performance improvements that we had to do while developing the iPhone version to the iPad. We also added better image caching support, so Colorbay on the iPad is a lot faster now!
Colorbay is a free download on the App Store. We can't wait to hear what you think. Please tweet @colorbay or email feedback, and we hope you enjoy the app.
You can now connect your App.net account to Colorbay and view all the wonderful photos uploaded to App.net. Colorbay has complete App.net support:
Search for tags and save your favorite tags like #hand_picd
Repost, favorite, and comment on photos
Get notified when there are new images in your saved searches!
Colorbay will show you photos uploaded from your favorite App.net photo app like Pixter, Favd, Sprinter and more!
Go ahead and download Colorbay 1.2 and let us know what you think! You can contact us via @colorbay on ADN and twitter or email!
We are making Colorbay free for Cyber Monday! This is your chance to get the app for free, right before some big updates are on the way. We waiting for Apple to approve the next update which brings App.net support and more to Colorbay! So go ahead and download it for free from the App Store!
Colorbay 1.1 is a major release. You can now view and post comments on photos right from Colorbay! This makes for an even more seamless experience and we hope you like it. You can get the update on the App Store now.