The latest development in our ongoing AdMob experiment has left us scratching our heads once again. As I mentioned in a previous article, we have toyed with the ad exchange before with pretty limited results. This time around the numbers look quite a bit different.

When we turned on the exchange functionality previously, our revenues went down, and we got a ridiculously small number of downloads after testing several ad copy versions. We left the exchange turned off until about a week ago. This time after we turned it on we started to see a drastic increase in revenue due to the fact that we started receiving dramatically larger numbers of CPM impressions from the network. The downloads were still amazing low, to the tune of about 6 downloads/150,000 impressions, but our CPM revenue is up well over 1000% gradually over the course of about 6 days.

I am personally at a loss as to why this might happen. I have no idea how turning on exchange impressions could tick something in the formula that would start serving us more CPM ads or if there was some kind of human intervention either from the network or advertisers. Of course there is the chance that it could be a complete coincidence so we will rinse and repeat to check that out as well.

If you happen to have any insight or inside information that might shed some light on the mysterious AdMob numbers that we discuss from time-to-time please feel free to leave a comment.