mergeconflict269
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[00:00:00] James: Frank let's 

do it. Let's talk about spending that hard earned cash Ola on advertise. 

[00:00:16] Frank: Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's do it, James. I don't do it enough. I never do it. I'm actually curious to hear your side of it, but it's been a few years and I was looking at my numbers and I was, I'm happy with my numbers by Mike.

My numbers can be better. More people can be buying my apps. Jane's they're good apps. More people should be buying them. And I remember that I don't ever advertise my apps and I'm like, Today is the day I'm going to advertise my apps. And, oh boy, do I have some thoughts about that? Experience 

[00:00:49] James: advertising is a scary, expensive that's that's mostly, you know, well, you know, when you look at like the numbers from the Facebooks and other, other social media sites, you know, they're, they make a, uh, an annual Google.

They make a vast amount of money and Amazon now too off of advertisements. And that's where the, the, the cash comes from. Right. You know, I've in the past experimented a little bit with like the Twitter, you know, give us 10 bucks, you know, we'll, we'll see how the tweet performs or whatever. And I'm like, I'm not doing this.

Right. I'm just throwing away $10. Like, that's kind of what it felt like. I'm like, I'm just throwing all the $10 

[00:01:27] Frank: that's you are so out of date, sir, the minimum is now $50. Take 

[00:01:34] James: that. Yeah. Well, I remember the good, the old days of when, uh, apple used to just give us free search ads, it's the money. And they're like, here's free money.

And I was like, I like free money. Um, but yeah, no, I mean, I, I think that was, that was one, the things it's to invest in to do it right. It's kind of a full-time job to really commit into advertising. And it's why you see really beautiful ads on Instagram and, and, and, and other social media sites. That's the only one I use.

But it's when you watch shark tank, for example, they're always talking about like the cost per acquisition. Like that's an important part is what's your cost per install, because if it costs you $10 and you're selling that thing for $5, well, that's not, that's not good. That's bad, you know, but there's a certain threshold of it.

And. I could never invest the time in it. I've done the search ads. I've done some Google ads. I've tried some on my YouTube videos, on my apps on some tweets. And, uh, I don't know. I just kinda felt like I was like just Willy nilly, just like throwing money against the wall and seeing if anyone picks it up and apple and Google and everybody else picked it up.

And that was. 

[00:02:47] Frank: Yeah. Okay. All of those topics we need to discuss, because there's so much there. Um, let's start with in the olden days, you used to be able to pay a little bit less, like you would do a Facebook and you'd give them a link to, I don't know, could you directly link to the app store or at least I would link to my website or something for my app.

And you could say something like $10 a day. Clickety click, maybe I'll get in there. You can still do that. Uh, one funny thing that I noticed though, is 10 hours a day, does not get you many ad slots anymore. So you do run into that exact problem that you just talked about. If you have a good ad, theoretically, up to a limit, the more money you put into advertisement, the more money you can make so long as, as you said, the price of the app is greater than the acquisition price.

It all sounds so simple and so logical, but how do you actually put that into practice? Like you said, I don't want to just throw money down a, well, I want to see actual results from it. So the one thing. Do have to do anytime I play with advertisements or do any of this kind of stuff is watch app sales, like a Hawk, and really pay attention to what is noise and what is actually coming from the ads.

But this actually comes into how things have changed. Things have changed and they've gotten weird so that you can actually close this loop a little bit better, but yeah, you know, I, I can look at them numbers and see if things changed. I think, I hope for example, I spent 50 bucks at Twitter on one specific.

Yeah. So I, you know, over one day, so I'm just going to look at the numbers for that day and see if they're they're huge, right. They should be 10 

[00:04:44] James: X, right? Yeah. I would say a 500 X. 

[00:04:48] Frank: That sounds wonderful. That sounds really good. Um, yeah. So just do that. So the big change that has happened, and that really threw me for a loop for a long time, because when you go into these advertisement portals, the ones I tried the most are Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook is also Instagram, your beloved, Instagram, and WhatsApp. They're really promoting WhatsApp. It's kind of. What they make it choose very first off is your objective. And they'll say like website and engagement website, click app install, and look at that. What a great name app install. That's what you want.

What do you think? What do you think that does?

[00:05:39] James: I would have gone down this route because I did this recently for, uh, uh, I think I had recently did it for, for my cadence. If I, if I think I did a Google ad for it. And if I remember, I think at that point I was able to like search the app store for my app and it will like pull in data and information about it.

Like what happened on, on this one? 

[00:06:03] Frank: Yeah. Th th that's what you wanted to do. It wasn't quite that simple, uh, for both Facebook and Twitter that have both of these objective app installs, what they make you do next is create an app record in their own systems. So on Facebook, you go to your like developer.

On Facebook and create an app registry there, even though you're never going to use the social parts of Facebook or anything, they still want you to create kind of an app record there. Same, same on the Twitter side. Now in those that's where you associate it with your bundle ID and other things. The kind of good part about that is if you have a cross platform app that's, um, a unified record for the multiple platforms.

So they definitely have iOS. They definitely have Android support. They don't have a good Mac support. Of course. 

[00:06:58] James: Yes. That makes sense. Yeah, that, that makes sense. I have to imagine that these apps and these services are heavily used on mobile first, and those are the more established app stores at this point.

So they're really diving into that as well. 

[00:07:17] Frank: Yeah. Yeah. So that's not so bad, whatever clickety, clickety, clickety click. Um, but now we get into the scary part. So for both services, you can now go through the entire process of creating ad campaigns and creating ads for me. I just had, um, my promotional videos that I put on the app.

And I figured those are good enough ads. So I was trying to do video ads. Do you like video ads as an Instagrammer? Do you prefer pictures or videos? 

[00:07:51] James: It depends what it is. If it's something that you need to see in motion then yes. But the images are fine 

[00:07:58] Frank: video. I'm hearing video from you 

[00:08:02] James: based on the movement.

I think if I'm on Twitter, I don't want video, but if I'm on Instagram, it's fine. 

[00:08:08] Frank: Yeah. Okay. Uh, I think I like video. I think it's just more captivating and all that. So I'm trying to go on that side of it. What's also need about all these services though, is you can just give them a bucket of data. You're like here's a video, here's five, a potential advertisements, and they're supposed to run their magic AI algorithm, optimizer thing.

In order to figure out the perfect ad combination on both Facebook. And I think on Twitter, you could give them multimedia and multi headlines and multi captions. It's a little awkward how ads work now because they can be placed in so many different places. Sometimes you're captured on be showed.

Sometimes your headline will be showed, but it's basically AB testing, but more like ABCD F G testing, which I think is 

[00:09:02] James: cool. It sounds like at this point, Frank, you're filling out the apple app store entry, uh, with every single bit of, you know what I mean? Like, it sounds like you're doing an immense amount of work and we're not even, and we haven't even finalized the campaign.

[00:09:21] Frank: No, no. And this isn't even like tech talk. I was like, oh, geez. What about the tick-tock? Can you advertise on the Tik TOK? How much does the Tik TOK advertisement cost? I don't know any of these things. This is all a bit of an experiment. So I think we'll have to have a review episode in three months or something to see how all of this goes.

Oh, yeah. But anyway. Yeah. Um, so you get your app record and there you get everything all associated. Yeah. Clickety click. You're happy with it. You decide on a budget and then you click the publish button and it says something horrific. Like you cannot do app install tracking unless you install R S D K.

Oh 

[00:10:04] James: my gosh. Runaway immediately get out of there. Oh my God. 

[00:10:11] Frank: They both want to put code into my app. I don't want to do. And wait, I haven't even told you the scariest part yet. What's this all turning into a horror story. Um, on the Facebook side, when you first start to do this, um, I want to attract app installs, you know, that's my end goal.

That's my objective. The first thing they ask you is, do you want to support iOS 14.5? And why is that change? Because apple cracked down on all of their magic tracking between their apps and pixel tracking. I don't know how any other advertisement tracking works, but apple decided to make it not to work.

Oh my 

[00:10:55] James: goodness. That's uh, that's interesting. I just installed some new apps too. Um, DJI ones and, uh, I got like 5 billion pop-ups and the new one that I got was, yeah. Do you want to do it's like the, it's the, it's the most hilarious verbiage from apple to they're like, do you want to, do you want to share all of your data with this company?

That's basically what it says and the answer. No, like no, no one ever is going to hit. Oh, that sounds great. That sounds, that sounds fantastic. Uh, so they definitely did a great job. I'm very happy with it. And, uh, yeah. I wonder how that impacts it overall. Or I remember, uh, looking at the most recent financials of Facebook and Snapchat and, and them, and they said that.

Facebook. So they weren't as impacted as they thought they were going to be. Snapchat said they changed enough in their code that it's not a big deal, but then Facebook so that they will be impacted it going forward. I just think the 14 dot five wasn't as big of an uptick, but obviously iOS 15 will and new devices launch with it.

So I wonder how much that impacts it, the like your actual output, like, does it have subs? I wonder if it has substantial impact on.

[00:12:16] Frank: Yeah. Yeah. Um, so I'm with you. Uh, every time I've gotten one of those new fancy dialogues that says, do you want to share data? I say, Nope, not interested. So I like that feature, but I have no idea what the actual effect on all these advertisement people are. It's really frustrating. So I guess we have two things here.

I don't want to install their SDK because I don't trust them to do horrific things with my app as a front man, basically. Yeah. Um, and then you have the secondary thing of apple. Doesn't want you sharing data and they're being very careful about. Blocking that and things. Yeah. So here's the deal, like why can't these advertisement?

People just give me a rest endpoint that I can hit and I can tell them, Hey, this is a app install thing. If there's a token, I'll go fetch the token. I'll go post it to a server. You know, I'm willing to write those five lines of code. Yeah. It's really frustrating that there is no happy middle ground like that.

It's all or nothing. I have to take their SDK with all of them. Who knows what the apple hates and 

[00:13:34] James: yeah. Really is an all or nothing type of situation, uh, in that regard, which is kind of a shame because, you know, the internet is built on APIs. Like just, yeah. Just give us an API. And all you would do is in your backend, right?

Like what they could do. It's so simple. Right? It's like all they would need to do. Right. Passing something when the app launches or something like that, like, you know, Google had something which was like, you could like share an app with a friend and then, you know, basically that would be like a code that if they downloaded it, then you would get, you know, you give them like a discount in the application or something like that.

So there's definitely a way to figure out that loop end, I assume to pass some information in, or maybe not. I don't know that that's the tricky part is like they don't own the app store. Right. So how are they gonna. Give you that information all 

[00:14:27] Frank: up, right? The, this has been the fundamental problem in apps, uh, app advertisement since the very beginning is that because apple controls the app store, we don't have a great way to do this end to end, uh, optimization of things.

Now the problem is here. I'm talking. I feel like apple did make progress here, but I'm real. I'm reaching for here. I'm reaching, I'm reaching. I can't think of it, but I thought they were starting to add, like, you can add a token to the link to the app store and that token might survive all the way to the purchase order.

So then in the purchase order, that token is available, please. Correct me if I'm wrong. And I apologize if I'm just making all of this up, but I feel like they've made a little bit of progress, but obviously, uh, Facebook still can't quite figure it out without making me install it. Scary SDK. 

[00:15:30] James: Yeah. They're going to, Facebook's going to want their data in.

And the other part was then like, so for you to even be able to start to promote your application in a proper way, if you want to really get the analytics and do all this stuff like that. Then you would actually need to install the SDK, put out a brand new release of this, and then you're not even using any of the features.

I get like sign in with Facebook or anything like. 

[00:15:53] Frank: Yeah, they won't even let you put up the ad until the app has talked back to the server at least once. So you have to do a full release in order to get these fancy app install, advertisements to work. Isn't this all sounding just so terrible. I 

[00:16:14] James: didn't why can't they just let you get no data and just say whatever, I'll just track it.

[00:16:19] Frank: I know. Well, in that case, what you do is website links, but I hate that website. Like I want to give a link to the app store. You know, I want that nice app experience without all this stuff, but now we have to talk about Twitter. They do it slightly differently. So they don't have the Twitter SDK that you install.

Like Facebook has the Facebook advertisement, SDK, blah, blah, blah. You put that into your app. Twitter doesn't have that. What they've done instead is created a standard. We all love standards for how this information can be collected and distributed. I don't know what words to use here. You know what I mean, token passing.

We got to get this. Around things. And what they have is a list of nine ish, different independent services, independent from Twitter, independent from Facebook that specialize in just this activity of passing this token around. So what Twitter wants you to do is not install their SDK, but install one of these other companies.

And of course those are payment plans, blah, blah, blah, you know, all that kind of stuff to make it work. Oh, my God, I hate advertising for apps. 

[00:17:36] James: Well, it makes you sort of, you know, realize that when you are advertising your product on the platform that sells your product, that is a. More streamlined approach and case in point.

And we'll talk about search ads here in a bit, because both Google and apple have these, but we have some of you listeners may have found our podcast this way, which is from overcast, uh, Marco action thing, and Marco genius that he is and generating so much revenue it's it's bananas. Uh, we talked about, this has enhanced.

Advertisement for podcasts. It's a podcast app that has advertisements for podcasts. And why is that amazing? Well, that's amazing. 

[00:18:31] Frank: I'm sorry. It's genius. It's just absolutely genius to turn your own app into a multi-source revenue stream. That is not an easy thing to pull off on the app store. Apple hates it when you create, um, additional stores and your things.

So sorry I interrupted you. Um, I just had to agree that it's a really amazing feat that he has pulled off. 

[00:18:53] James: Yeah, it's, it's truly spectacular because what he ended up doing was all the things that you did as is now as a podcast owner, I, I don't need, you know, an SDK or I don't need an end point for him to add.

He has his own end point that he's tracking the taps, the subscriptions, because when you tap on a podcast and overcast, it takes you to the podcast inside the application. It doesn't launch apple podcasts because that's what you would normally do like you. And normally, if we were to take a, uh, an ad out on.

Um, let's say Twitter for the podcast. What we would do is we would take out an ad and then we would most likely go to a third party website that allows us to create a bunch of links that go to different app stores. Uh, we also have like a merge conflict. Slash or merge conflict.fm/subscribe. And I think it has all the links there, which is another option, but that's not a graceful experience.

What you want to have happen is it opens your default podcast app and that's nearly impossible. Um, you know, an Android, everybody has a different podcast app, but on iOS, at least you could say, well, you know, a certain percentage are going to have apple podcasts, but at the same time, what about over overcast?

And what about Castro? And what about all the other ones? So this is a great experience. He's built a user base and may this great foundation that when you tap the ad, which is contextualize, it has categories. So if you're listening to a technology podcast, what other podcasts do you think Frank, you might be interested.

[00:20:25] Frank: Who a science and art podcast could 

[00:20:31] James: be. Are there science and culture technology? You know, there's different groups of categories that, that are together. And then there's an all, like, it just happens everywhere and he's able to serve up those, those things. And then what's cool is that I can go into my dashboard.

I can tell you exactly here. Here we go. Check this. Last time we advertise. It was a while ago. We did merge conflict, but this is when it used to be cheap. We spent $270. That's quite 

[00:20:57] Frank: expensive advertising. It's expensive. Uh, that was, 

[00:21:01] James: uh, this is kind of cool. It's for one month. That's, what's kind of nice about it in technology is a merge conflict, and then you, you type in your podcasts and he's already indexed all the podcasts, so he's got them.

All right. And then, um, it will tell me that this was viewed 44,000 times. That was pretty cool. Um, it was clicked 3,315, which is a 7.4%. Conversion Isley, Marcelo stats, and then 209 people are 6.3% of overall views tapped, but not overall view. Sorry of, of taps subs subscribed to the podcast. So of the, of the 7.4% that tapped on it, 6.3% of those Reddit subscribed to the pod.

[00:21:50] Frank: Right. And that's ideally how advertisement would work for app developers. We would put together five images, five headlines, five captions, whatever, throw it into a magic AI algorithm. And it would tell us this many people viewed this one, this many people clicked on this one. This many people bought your app from this one.

And then we could do good advertisement. Oh, what a wonderful world that would be instead you're clicking in. Did I, did I mention, by the way, how terrible these web backends are for these advertisement things? They're amazing. They use like, That blade concept where everything horizontally stacks and has its own like X window or what all X to close windows and all that stuff.

Let me just take a moment and say, please don't make your web apps like that. But the web is designed to work. Vertically build your apps to work vertically. It's fine. Okay. Uh, so once you've gone through all that pain and torture, um, you still don't get that benefit of that end-to-end experience that Marco is providing without doing these crazy SDK things.

So who knows if they're compatible with Atlas 14 point. Yeah. So, um, but when you're left with no knowledge, you just go forward, right? Because in the end, um, you can just look at your sales numbers and hope that there's a correlation. Hopefully there's a pretty obvious correlation with spending the money.

So then it becomes how much money can you spend? I used to advertise on Reddit. And that would be like 50 to a hundred dollars per day, but it would get you a pretty good kind of turnaround. You had to have a good price to app so that the few conversions that it increases, uh, can cover the bill. But it was possible, but I never really loved it.

It never seemed like it was working very much. Plus I could never really swallow spending like $50 a day, a hundred dollars a day. Those numbers sounds so big. Whereas on Facebook you could say like 10 hours a day and then I can say, oh, $300 a month. Okay. That sounds like, yeah. Even if it doesn't make any conversions, I can swallow $300 a month just on the off chance that it will, but I want to do better than that and make sure I'm not even throwing away 300 hours.

Or month a month, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. So here's the problem though, that used to work, they would show you numbers and all that stuff. It was great. What I found though is 10 hours a day is not enough for daddy's Zuckerberg. You need to give Tucker Burke more money, or he's not even going to show your ad.

[00:24:51] James: Yeah. Not even once. He's just like, nah, not fam 

[00:24:55] Frank: fam you know, it's all so confusing how the bidding stuff works. So you can put in bids with numbers, or you can put in budgets, you can put in daily budgets and monthly budgets and yearly budgets. They love it with the yearly budgets, but in the end, it's a bidding system.

If there are five ads to. Reach one person who's reading their home page. Then they're going to take whichever ad is willing to pay the most money. And it turns out that with a low daily budget, you're just never going to win any of those bids. So that's kind of the funny situation I found myself in right now.

So even after I've gone through. All that rigmarole of creating an ad and then failing to create an app install ad because I don't want to put the Facebook thing and I just created a link ad, created my link ad and the stupid thing still isn't working. James, can someone out there please solve the app advertisement problem for 

[00:25:59] James: us?

Oh my goodness. So have you just given up at this point, then I you've done all this. Like you just have no, you have nothing 26 minutes, Frank, and you have nothing to show. At all, not a single, not a single view 

[00:26:13] Frank: I do because thank goodness Twitter came through from, okay, Twitter works. Twitter is a little bit simpler, but even they have their funny little hangups.

So one neat thing you can do on Twitter, which some people love, some people hate, but, um, you can just take any old tweet you have and say promote this tweet. Mm. 

[00:26:34] James: Yeah. Right. Good Twitter, good feature. That's a good feature, especially if you've like done. A really good job of putting a video or, you know, nice audio or text or emojis in there.

And like, if you already have a crafted 

[00:26:48] Frank: yeah. And it is semi effective. I don't know. The semi is like, I, I didn't get a lot of turnaround, but I took a tweet when I had first announced I circuits. And that's, we did pretty great. And I figured out what the heck, throw some money behind it. See what happens just as the easiest thing, because, um, well, we'll get to that because, so I did that and they have minimum amounts, all that kind of stuff.

They make it pretty easy. And the fun part was I actually got some engagement, as they say, hashtag engagement, where people were retweeting it and replying about it. I actually. Kind of liked it from like an ease of use experience, um, and a actually getting to talk to people from it. I kind of love that.

You know, I'm not probably not going to engage with anyone with the Facebook ads, but on Twitter you definitely can engage. So I like that part. The reason I'm being a little hesitant is. I don't think it actually had any great conversion results for me, or at least I'm still waiting for a few more numbers to come in.

Um, I did this just a few days ago and Apple's super slow sometimes. Um, but I'm not seeing any like dramatic increases. But I will say from a simplicity point of view. Wow. That was great. Easy way to burn some money people. 

[00:28:10] James: Yeah. Yeah. Do you want to hand Twitter? Some money are done. Got it. And that was always my fear with the tour.

Cause I've done that before and I see it and I'm like, okay, cool. And, um, but, but then Y like I see like, oh, it's been viewed more times or I've it's the, the media has been viewed, but I was like, hi, I would like to install this thing. What happened? Like what happened? And, and maybe this is, you know, us being a little naive because we're not in marketing, right.

We're not social media experts and understanding advertisement in this regard, like we are independent app developers that would like to do some promotion of our app. And maybe these are the wrong places. Have you just considered it? Like, maybe this is just not correct. 

[00:28:56] Frank: Oh, absolutely. And please write in everyone and let us know.

I would love it if I'm missing something obvious. The problem is, I don't think I am. Um, social networks are kind of where people's eyeballs are right now. I mean, I guess I could take out a TV ad that people in the greater Seattle area could I'll purchase it. But, um, yeah, I, I would love to know if there's a good alternative for sure.

Um, one funny little tidbits on the Twitter side. If you don't have like a tweet ready to go, you can create what they call promotion only tweets. And these are kind of nice because you don't have to spam your follower list with it. You know, I didn't want to like, yeah. Pop out like five different ice circuit ads in a row, just so that I could re pay to retweet them later.

Um, You create promotion only. It's a little checkbox when you go into their advertisement portal. The funny thing is in order to create one for an app, you have to create what's called an app card. So Jesus' Twitter cards and they have a whole UI to create a Twitter app card. So the process everyone is there.

To advertise on the tweeters first release an app. Step one, step one, step two, go to, uh, the tweeters and you have to create an app record. So you have to create your app within Twitter, just like, uh, in Facebook. And this is good so that you can unify iOS and Android and all that kind of stuff. Anyway, create one of those next, create an app card, associate your app card with your app, right.

Great. We're doing great, James, and we're almost done next. Create a tweet, make a promotional only. So you're not spamming people associate that tweet with your card. We are so darn close now create that. Now create an advertisement. Campaign from that, create an advertisement set under the advertisements that create an advertisement under the advertisement, select your content that you created on before.

As you're promoted, only tweet, nice and easy. Add that's your ad. And then click the publish button. And you know what? It's going to tell you what pending too bad. Oh, now. You have to install our SDK. So we're back to that original problem that we were talking about before. So even after you go through all of that stuff, they want their SDKs installed too.

Now it's not the Twitter SDK, it's those other ones I was mentioning, but you have to do that and they have a really cute name. It's something like verified purchases or something. That's what they want. Yeah. So you can't do any of that stuff that I just said, what you're left with is create a tweet with a link to the app store and promote that because stupid Twitter cards don't work unless you install the rest of the case.

Now 

[00:31:58] James: we've talked a lot about Twitters and the Facebooks and these bigger social medias, but have you in, did you, we talked about this before, but take a look at the thing. That is built in to the app store called search. 

[00:32:16] Frank: Yes, I have. Yes, I have. I have a pretty low budget. I am doing the basic ads because I know nothing about advertisement and with the basic ads, it's a one-click.

Do you want to advertise? And then you tell them, you know, the maximum amount you're wanting to spend as a per day or per week. Anyway, I sat like a little budget in there. It's a low budget because I'm paranoid and I'm bad at advertisement. And I honestly have absolutely no idea. If any of these search ads are producing anything.

I know they have nice displays and you can go in there because it is apple. They're running their app stores. So they can tell you this many people saw the ad. This many people actually purchased the app, but I haven't been overwhelmed. By those numbers either. It wasn't like I turned on search ads and all of a sudden I had doubled my profits.

Did you double your profits with search ads? 

[00:33:11] James: So I did use search ads for both island tracker and my cadence. And I haven't, I don't think I have data for island trackers. It was one of those paid as a little bit trickier, but I have done it for my cadence, which is a free app and I spent $32. Money hard earned money.

And I got 174 ins. Oh, 

[00:33:39] Frank: that's the free one, right? That has the in-app purchase, right? 

[00:33:42] James: That is the free one. Yes. Um, I believe I had it turned on for island tracker, but I don't think I got any installs or like the, I don't, I don't remember it being high or if I did, it was there, but the cost per install of my cadence is 18 cents, which, which that was pretty good.

18 cents. Like that's, that's cheap as less than a quarter. You know what I mean? That's, that's not bad. Um, 

[00:34:03] Frank: right. Oh, sorry, sorry to interrupt. But you're making me realize what you want now is you added an additional leg for the in-app purchase. You want to know the conversion rate to an app purchase too, but that's something probably a little bit separate, probably another chart that you can see 

[00:34:20] James: in the store.

You don't get that data. That is not data you get, because they're not tracking users after that they're tracking in the store. But they don't track the, the users they don't know after. See James, 

[00:34:31] Frank: if you just install the Facebook or not Twitter SDKs, you can have it. It's actually kind of interesting. Uh, in addition to app installs that you can pay for advertisements for, you can pay for app events, uh, So this is for people who already use your app.

I guess if you are like a movie studio and you wanted to promote a movie, you want people to actually go to that deep link, like get into the app and actually register this event. So it's kind of neat how these SDKs work. I'm a little bit excited because I really wish this stuff actually worked the way it said.

Um, you can register a bunch of events on the terrible web portal, maybe. Um, What year in app purchases would be those events. And then in the app with these SDKs installed, you would signal that event. So now you wouldn't just be advertising for installs of your app. You can be advertising for these specific in-app purchases within your apps.

That ain't cool. Know which ads actually optimize for people who will do that. Yeah. That purchase, oh, retirement ad actually worked. Wasn't creepy. Wasn't invasive to people's privacy. Like, you know, good advertisement is useful. I really think that I. The YouTube recommendation and, you know, I, I want good recommendations from the app store.

It's too bad that all this stuff is so mixed up with terrible security and privacy that we don't have decent ads. And. I'm just complaining this episode. I'm realizing everyone. I want to advertise more. I'm just terrible at it. The, the 

[00:36:13] James: thing is it's also quite complicated. I do like the here's a one thing I like about search ads is they have a basic and advanced view and the basic, which I hope never goes away is the drop dead.

Simple. Just go get it. Because the problem that I have with advanced. And I have this with Google and Twitter. And the other ones is like, the thing that you just said is like, you got to create a campaign and then a group and then a thing, and then other thing, and then this other thing, and you're like, where's my advert.

Like, where's my advertisement. And then you got to turn on this thing and turn off that thing and turn on this other thing over there. And you're like, I just want to put my app on the thing and I want people to see it please. And I get, I get so lost in the terminology that I'm like, uh, I guess I. I guess I spent a hundred dollars, like, okay.

Like, I dunno, you know, uh, it confused me and upsets me. It almost upsets me to a point that I'm just like, all right, I'm not there, but I will say this, that, and I can't the apples, the search ads like is, is, is not showing me additional data from it at all. But I think that is the missing list link is I, as I stopped paying for it, cause I said, wow, I need to know my conversion.

Right? Is it 10% people getting the pro version of this as it XYZ am? Am I conversion is pretty low in general, you know, I mean, uh, from the application. So I think I have some data here, but it's like, you know, I, I definitely don't, you know, it's in the 1%, it's not in the 10%. So for me to make back $30, I would need.

I guess I would need 5% of people to upgrade to pro and I'm not even getting that off of normal people that find my application. Um, so that's, uh, a little bit worrying, I guess. So I turned it off, but I guess if I wanted to stomp over the other applications, it does do a good job. Here's the funny part is like, I always like search for my app to see like how I'm ranking and how the other apps are coming up.

And then I remember like seeing my own ad and I was like, oh, that just cost me whatever, blah, blah, blah. That just cost me whatever. So 

[00:38:20] Frank: costume impression. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Have we just concluded that it's hopeless now there has to be a hope out there somewhere. You know, I do like speaking of our, all the social media is a wrong way to go.

I think podcasts, advertisements, kind of a cool place to, um, I've been tempted to do some of the bigger podcasts like ATP, but they can be like all good advertisement, ex expensive or costly, whichever word you want to use. So you have to be pretty certain that the return on your money is going to be worth it.

You know, podcasts are kind of neat because you have a concentrated audience and audience who is very, um, deeply knowledgeable and interested in particular subjects. It's really targeted versus me going on Facebook and saying, Hey everyone, you need circuit simulation software. Doesn't everyone need circuits simulation.

That's 

[00:39:23] James: true. I also like a good a Rita. I've done some, I definitely, I did a podcast, I think like when they were doing the gaming ride home or whatever. So the me rhino, I think I did one for island tracker on it, but again, that's one of those things where I should have set up like a special URL and I should have had like a, you know, tracking thing.

I think that it was just like, just search for island tracker in the app store. Right. Which is like not, they're already on a phone, just like, you know, search for it and blah, blah, blah. But. Yeah, advertisements man advertising. 

[00:39:57] Frank: Yeah, so now I'm depressed, but w w well, uh, check back in three months and see if I'm still depressed by the whole state of affairs, but it had been years since I'd done this.

And I was really shocked by that big change of them actually trying to track app installs versus in the past, we really were just truly blind. We were just going for a website links and all that. I was surprised by that change. Um, I was hoping for it to be. Better since it's been so long since I've advertised, but I was a little bit disappointed.

Well, we'll see. Maybe my experiments will come out. Maybe I'll finally find a magic number where Zuckerberg will start showing my ad and I'll make billions and billions of dollars. 

[00:40:42] James: Or maybe one of our amazing listeners will write in by going to emerge conflict out of them and telling us how you advertise your advert, your, your application.

And it was absolutely spectacular. Let us know. Uh, I would love to know maybe we're just doing it wrong. We just need your help. We need your help people. We need your help. Uh, all right. Well, I think it's going to do it Frank. Anything else? 

[00:41:03] Frank: Nope. That's it advertisement. I don't know what I'm doing. 

[00:41:08] James: Fail, failing it.

Advertising. We're not advertised as all right. Well, anyways, well, thanks everyone for tuning in. I had fun with this. I went through the same exact thing as you Frank. And I have to imagine that you and I aren't the only one. So please write in, let us know. Or if you have a, you know, advertising specialist at work, we'd love to interview them.

We don't interview very many people, but you know, we'd love to do that and just figure out what we're doing. We need that's, that's an interview, Frank, somebody it's not about, you know, what they, you know, you know, it's not them selling their advertisement service. Like we need to know what we need to do.

If you have a Frank merge conflict that FM contact form, let us know what do I bring them out of the podcast. So. All right. 

[00:41:52] Frank: We need to make money. That's all we need to do. Simple as that. I just want people 

[00:41:56] James: to be happy is my app. It's awesome. What's going on with being updates, so go get it. All right, everyone.

Let's get it for this week's merchant conflicts. And until next time I'll have lots of now, now, 

[00:42:03] Frank: and I'm Frank Krueger. Thanks for listening.