How to make the most of your iPad and iPhone apps with iAd

How to optimize your ads iAds in apps for iPhone or iPad

Did you know that on average, 50% of requests for ads with iAd not receive any impression? There are several reasons that make this happen, but the pricipal is that Apple exije advertisers a minimum investment of $ 100,000 to put launched an advertising campaign. In many countries nobody ever hires campaigns because they know they will never return on investment, and other (as in Spain) there are not enough active campaigns to fill all ad requests.

This makes sense: Apple wants advertising campaigns that provide quality products real and interesting content for the user, but has a negative effect on developers, who see their impressions are lost by failing listings available.

In the table below you can see the impression rates six different apps, and landfill rates vary between 16% and 100%, giving an average of about 50% of impressions. Silver said, this means that the developer does not receive money for these impressions, damaging the profitability of your product.

Can we do something about it to improve this information?

One of the most simple and profitable in economic terms is to check if the ad is printed, or not, if not print a banner of our harvest. Fortunately, the iAd API has a function that is required to integrate iAd integration (mainly because they want when no device ads do not call in vain to avoid overloading the network iAd), and we can take advantage of such effect.

Embed this banner is a great idea for several reasons, but the main thing is that we do not lose money when printed, because in any case we were not going to win anything this time. Also if we promote for example the paid version of our app is very likely (almost certain) that the user running the free version with ads have an interest in this type of applications, since it has been downloaded the free version try it. If not the case we can always promote another app that interests us or some other developer (there are networks of cross-promotion).

The function that interests us is

- (Void) bannerView: (ADBannerView *) banner didFailToReceiveAdWithError: (NSError *) error
{
if (_adBannerViewIsVisible)
{
_adBannerViewIsVisible = NO;
[Self fixupAdView: [UIDevice currentDevice]. Orientation];
}
}

To carry out the modification simply add a few lines to the function so that in the event that the announcement of iAd fails to activate our own banner.

- (Void) bannerView: (ADBannerView *) banner didFailToReceiveAdWithError: (NSError *) error
{
if (_adBannerViewIsVisible)
{
_adBannerViewIsVisible = NO;
[Self fixupAdView: [UIDevice currentDevice]. Orientation];
}

myBanner.hidden = FALSE;
myBanner.enabled = TRUE;

[_adBannerView RemoveFromSuperview];
[_adBannerView Release];
}

Let me explain a little modifications

myBanner.hidden = FALSE;
myBanner.enabled = TRUE;

With these two lines are indicating that in case of fault is displayed on the button containing our banner (which add later) is enabled and that it can puncture.

[_adBannerView RemoveFromSuperview];
[_adBannerView Release];

These two lines remove the iAd banner and release memory.

The next step is to add a UIButton to our XIB over the exact location of where you would put the iAd banner, covering it completely. Remember that the sizes of the banners should be 320 × 50 px for iPhone and 768 × 67 px for the iPad.

Not sure you attach the button to File's Owner to access their property, because otherwise we can not act on it.

Also, when starting the app we hide our default button from appearing, as it is only visible when iAd fails.

- (Void) viewDidLoad
{
[Super viewDidLoad];
myBanner.hidden = TRUE;
myBanner.enabled = FALSE;
}

Finally, the property must unite Touch Up Inside the IBAction button you want to execute when the user touches the banner

- (IBAction) tapBanner: (id) sender
{
[[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL: [NSURL URLWithString: PROVERSION]];
}

In this case the chain PROVERSION iTunes is the URL of the app you want to show. By clicking the banner openURL function opens the App Store and will lead to the application in the store.

Finally, to prove that your new banner system works you have only to put the device in airplane mode so you have internet connection and so fail iAd. Do not you forget to turn it back and check that you get the test announcement iAd because it is easy to get confused with the order of the layers and cover the announcement of Apple (which of course would immediately refusing the app in the review) .

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