Mobile Display Advertising - Where Should You Run on Google?

Written by Claire Friday, 27 April 2012 15:52

Last month I posted that AdMob was moving to the AdWords platform, and that we were excited. Boy was I wrong.

We had run mobile display campaigns in AdWords in the past... it worked for a while, but started to really tank about a year ago. Then at the end of the summer in 2011 we really saw our quality drop off. I looked into our proprietary system data and saw that 97% of the traffic on US-only campaigns was coming from places like Nigeria, India and China. Google was getting their mobile targeting wrong by a long shot.

I bet you're wondering why we were psyched that AdMob was moving to the AdWords platform after having so much failure with the GDN in the past. Well, AdMob has been a really great source for us in the past 6 months. We've been able to gain affordable clicks, acceptable quality, and ultimately make money on our investments there. So we figured that having the data that the AdWords UI supplies, but with the same quality AdMob traffic, would work out for us.

It didn't.

We found that as soon as we transferred our AdMob accounts into AdWords, traffic dropped. We tested multiple changes but ultimately found that:

• Clicks were more expensive
• There was a huge infiltration of foreign traffic
• We were losing money

So for now, our mobile display campaigns in AdWords are paused. But what scares me is that this can't be our long-term solution. We've heard from multiple Google reps that within the year the AdMob UI as it is today will be completely integrated into AdWords and we'll be forced to either make that traffic work, or relinquish the GDN as a source. Neither option is ideal.

Here's hoping that Google fixes their mobile location targeting so it can work for us all.