MilitaryLounge.com - industry leader of Military and Government Mobile Applications

The MilitaryLounge Blog.

Website changes...

Oct 10th, 2010

We've finished the initial updates to the MilitaryLounge.com website. There's still a lengthly list of additions that will hopefully be added over the next two weeks (including feedback forms and App suggestions). Overall, the design - I hope - is a pleasing change to our old website.

MilPay on Android!

Oct 1st, 2010

Our first Android App is all done! MilPay has been successfully ported to the new platform. Admittedly, we had to leave out a few features that have been incorporated into the iPhone version of MilPay. Namely, the incentive pays will not be available on the Android version until version 1.1 is released - which should happen within the next two weeks.

The lessons learned in this initial push to Android will allow us to quickly move the additional MilitaryLounge Apps to the Android platform. As with all software development, the learning curve dramatically changes after completing the first project.

AdMob: not impressed

Sept 15th, 2010

In our latest Advertising efforts, we decided to give the company AdMob a try at promoting our Apps. The company offers in-App mobile advertising, similar to Google AdWords or Apple's new iAd. Unfortunately, we quickly learned that AdMob was a terrible way for us to spend our precious (and small) advertising budget. Here are a few things we learned...

For those unfamiliar with the company, AdMob allows customers to set a campaign budget, create ad criteria, and specify advertising demographics. In our situation, we decided to budget $50 for our first campaign. For comparison purposes, a well-designed Google Adwords campaign could last several days or more with such a budget. Both AdMob and Google charge you for the 'clicks' that are made on your advertisements. Thus, the Click-Through-Rate (CTR) is an important measurement of Ad success (i.e. how interesting your Ad is) and how quickly you will burn through your budget. The Cost Per Click (CPC) also factors into this equation, but both Google and AdMob use similar pay structures, so your clicks only cost around $.10 each. The CPC can change dramatically, so please only consider this a generic example.

Getting back to the AdMob situation. We budgeted $50 and AdMob burned through all of the funds in less than one hour! The overall increase in sales resulting from this $50 campaign: zero. I'm sure the company has some elaborate explanation of what happened, but the bottom line is there is no benefit to burning through a campaign that quickly. Additionally, it's hard to believe that in one hour there were that many people interested in clicking on Ads about Military iPhone Apps. It would be great if there were, but realistically I'm pretty sure there was some click fraud going on.

I'm going to Google next time.