How iAd Workbench Will Make Developers Lives Easier
Now that the barrier to entry to iAd has dropped from $1 Million for minimum campaign budget to just $50, this opens up the doors for a lot of developers who are looking for app advertising alternatives. Sure Facebook works great and CPE even better. But this is something that cannot go without mention.
iAd Workbench gives developers looking to promote their apps the ability to reach millions of iOS users with one of the simplest way to create, manage and optimize ad campaigns to promote their apps. Getting started is a few simple steps away.
- Select your audience
- Build your banners
- Track your performance to drive downloads at the cost that works for you.
Check out their video here.
To break down the features individually, let's start off with..
Targeting Your audience
"With iAd Workbench you can target who you want, when you want, manually, automatically or both. Assign specific targeting criteria (such as device, gender, age, location and preferences) to your campaign, or have iAd find the right audience for you."
Managing Your Campaign
"iAd Workbench helps you plan and buy media efficiently so that you can focus on what’s important: driving downloads of your apps. Set bid prices based on cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-acquisition (CPA) goals."
Creating Banners
In addition to what's provided through iAd's Workbench Apple has also created iAd Producer, which is a pretty nice looking piece of software (if I say so myself) to aid developers looking to make their banners look cool. Video here.
"If your ad is running on multiple devices, iAd Workbench automatically produces all the needed versions in required sizes. You can also reuse banners from previous campaigns, or upload your own creative."
Dashboard Metrics
Apple provides developers the ability to "manage all of your campaigns from the Dashboard, which provides a quick summary of your campaign status including total spend, impressions, taps, average CPC and CPA, tap-through-rate (TTR) and number of downloads. From there you can change any of the campaign settings, edit banners, review overall performance, and optimize campaigns for improved results."
Analytics
If the Dashboard Metrics weren't enough to get a handle on your campaigns that aren't performing as well as you thought they would, iAd Workbench provides deeper analytics visualizations to see what's working, and what's not.
While iAd Workbench is currently only available in the U.S. Publishers interested in advertising outside of the U.S. are urged to submit a request to have an Apple representative contact you.
System Requirements
Note: For best results, it’s recommended that you use iAd Workbench with one of the following operating systems and browsers:
OS X Mountain Lion (v10.8) and Safari
Windows XP and Firefox
Windows 7 and Chrome