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I’m not a huge fan of advertising. Advertising today seems to be ineffective, ignored, ignorant, and ill-conceived. But, as a businessman, I recognize that it’s vital to get the word out to people about your products. You have to let people know you exist, or you’ll never sell anything.

As a result, I recently started an Ad Campaign on the Fusion ad network for iZen Garden 2.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last year looking at various advertising opportunities, and I thought it might be useful to others to reveal some of my thought process that brought me to advertising on the Fusion network, and also to reveal some interesting problems with Google AdWords and the like.

The Problems with AdWords.

First, I want to describe a couple of issues with Google AdWords.

AdWords seems like a pretty good deal for advertisers. In theory, you enter keywords, and Google places your ads alongside content and search results that match those keywords. Unfortunately, in practice, (at least in my experience) the placement is far from ideal. First off, it appears from what I can see that there’s no way to get graphical ads to display alongside search results at all. Search result ads are limited to text-only. The text you can enter for those ads is extremely limited, and as a result, it’s really hard to get any kind of branding out there using text-only ads.

iZen Garden seems to benefit greatest from graphical ads as well. By far, we get much more click-throughs for our graphical ads than our text ads. I think this is a by-product of the fact that it’s a very graphically rich application and appeals primarily to people who appreciate such things.

In addition to all that – I’m sorry Google, but your text ads look horrible. There, I said it. They’re ugly, and you dress them funny.

So the point here is: I want to use graphical ads. Ok, fine, you can do that on AdWords. The problem, though, is that in order to get virtually any impressions, you have to run those graphical ads on Google’s “Automatic Placements Ad Network,” and it’s here that the biggest problem with AdWords lies.

AdWords – Paying Pirates to Pirate My App

So I set up an ad campaign on AdWords a couple of months ago. And I watched as things simmered along – low traffic, low click-throughs – for a few weeks. Then suddenly, one day, my traffic and click-throughs jumped. There was no increase in sales, but my click-throughs increased about 200% overnight. How strange, I thought, as I looked through the source of the increase in traffic. I pay for each click using AdWords, so I tend to keep an eye on where things are coming from as a result. I was shocked when I found that the majority of this new traffic was in fact coming from a pirate iPhone app site.
Apparently, Google had allowed a site that openly pirates iPhone apps to be one of their partners. In fact, they had actually allowed 3 sites of this nature to run AdWords ads! I would think Google would do a better job of vetting their partners. Sadly, it appears that’s not the case.

Consider the irony, since the click-throughs on the ads on these sites paid the sites, that I was actually paying people who pirated my work!

Now I’m not the kind of person who is vindictive about these kinds of things. I don’t, typically, spend much time thinking about piracy. I prefer to err on the side of expending effort improving my products rather than going after customers who probably wouldn’t buy it anyway. However, I’m certainly not going to give them my money as well! To quote Jeff Lebowski, “That will not stand.”

I quickly blacklisted the sites from my ad campaign and went along my merry way, but it got me looking closely at the other sites in the network list, and I was saddened to find that frankly, the vast majority of the high traffic sites that my ad was showing on were not sites I wanted my product to be featured on at all! Most of them were basically internet scams and pirates!

I want to associate my company and my products with only the highest quality web sites and products. Sites like TUAW, Minimal Mac, and so on. Sites I would be proud to be featured on.

I recognize that I can choose not to be on the Automated Placement network and then I won’t have this problem. The issue is, I’m a very busy person, and frankly, Google, you’re supposed to be the experts! I’m paying you to make my product look good and be on sites that will make me proud. If I have to do it all myself, it’s not really worth it to me. I just don’t have the time to figure out all the premier websites and what ads they take. I want you to have figured that out for me already.

Anyway, in short, AdWords is like the WalMart of advertising. It’s ugly, and cheap, and your products get stuck in among the toilet paper and the pickles.

AdMob – People Who Download Ad-Supported Apps Don’t Buy Pay-For Apps

I’ve also tried AdMob ads. And after burning through several hundred dollars in mere minutes without a single tiny uptick in sales, I have yet to find any value in advertising with them.

I credit this to two problems. The first is that I think the majority of AdMob ads run on free apps that are ad-supported, and I think people who download such apps are simply not likely to buy paid apps. If I were to advertise something free, I think that would be a much better fit.

The second problem I think is much more insidious. It’s that I think there’s a very large portion of developers who deliberately place ads near where you need to touch to use the UI. With the inaccuracy of multi-touch being what it is, it’s only natural that there are probably a lot of mis-clicks that trigger a click-through when it’s not intentional. I’m not going to go so far as to say that this is actual click-fraud, but I would say it’s not far from it, and regardless, it causes me to have to pay for click-throughs from people who had no intention of clicking my ad and no interest in buying my product!

Fusion – A Welcome Respite

So this brings me to what I feel is a conclusion and a solution for this situation.

To summarize once more, I want:

My ads to be beautiful.

My ads to run on websites that are beautiful, and high quality.

My ads to be displayed to people who appreciate beauty and good design.

My ads to be displayed to people who spend money on apps.

My ads to be displayed in locations that don’t allow for mis-clicks, or at the least, to be paid for by display duration rather than click-throughs or impressions – both of which kinda stink.

The Fusion Ad network supports all of this and does it brilliantly. They only allow the highest quality, attractive ads on their network, which means that they are able to advertise on sites that care about how their sites look. You buy your ads based on a timeframe of running on their network, so if they get a million impressions in a week, you get an even share of that with the other advertisers.

So far, I really like them. I’m not sure how the end result is in terms of actual sales, but I can honestly say that I am proud to have my product shown along every one of the other ones on their network, and I’m proud to have my product advertised on every one of their network partners.

In addition to all this, Fusion is the only ad network I have ever actually clicked-on and purchased items from myself.

If you’re an iPhone developer, I urge you to check them out. They are reasonably priced, friendly, and they “get it.”