AdMob, which serves billions of banner and text ads to mobile phones every month, has launched a download tracking tool for iPhone app developers who use AdMob’s pay-per-click service. Advertisers will now be able to measure conversion rates — the percentage of times a click on an ad touting an iPhone or iPod touch app leads to a sale. AdMob says its ad delivery service reaches 8.4 million iPhones and iPod touch owners worldwide.

The big idea is that advertisers on AdMob’s network are now able to measure the effectiveness of their mobile advertising so they can write better-targeted ads, calculate their return on ad spending, fine tune their App Description pages in the App Store, and develop more sophisticated marketing strategies.

Advertisers can use download tracking to view and track apps and look at conversion rates by specific ads and dates. In a pilot program in December to test the ad tracking tool’s effectiveness, AdMob noted the following trends:

• Free apps have an average conversion rate of 10 percent, significantly higher than the average 1 percent conversion rate for paid applications.
• Games generally have higher conversion rates than other genres of apps–up to 100 percent improvement over non-game apps at similar price points.
• The App Store is an effective distribution platform for free app. The average acquisition cost for free apps is under $1.00, significantly less than the average apps download costs on the Web.

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category: Breaking News