With the popularity of iPhone apps and now iPad apps, mobile advertising has become a very exciting growth market. To monetize that mobile traffic, apps are today relying on mobile ad networks such as Google’s adMob, mobclix and soon Apple’s iAds.

While eCPMs on the iPhone have been better than traditional online eCPMs, they never get near direct-sales ad rates (card-rates) since app owners are running their ads through ad networks.  That is where Shiny Ads’ self-service advertising platform can help.

While most of our publishers operate large online web sites, our platform can also handle mobile advertising in apps and to showcase how you can accomplish this, I’ll give you an example of one of our publishers who also has an iphone app;

Dogbook released an iPhone app that has similar functionality to their famous Facebook app.  They chose to monetize it with a 320×48 ad unit at the bottom of their application.  This ad unit is being served by the same OpenX ad server that serves their online ads.  This has the benefit of allowing Dogbook to change their ads in real-time and not have to release app updates whenever they change ad networks or paid campaigns.  They are planning on an iPad version too and the only change that they will need to do, is to create a new ad unit with a size of 640×50.

Since this ad unit is being served up by a traditional ad server, they created a new ad zone in Shiny Ads that allows smaller advertisers to purchase the iPhone ad unit.  These ad campaigns get served up instead of the ad network ads and monetize at a much higher revenue level.  When a user clicks on the ad, a new Safari full-page window opens up with the destination URL.

If you don’t run your own ad server, you can still use Shiny Ads’ ad serving code in place of your traditional ad network code.  Just point your mobile ad unit to our ad serving code and place your ad network’s ad serving code as the default ad in our publisher interface.  That will ensure that when you receive an advertising order, it will be displayed instead of the ad network’s remnant banners.

For the last 3 weeks, our self-serve advertising interface has been asking advertisers specific questions about the ad purchase process. Shiny Ads has been metrics tracking in places for months now, but until now we didn’t know why users “dropped off” the sales cycle.

Today, we made available 3 key pieces of feedback so that our publisher can make the appropriate changes to their pricing and media kits and increase their conversation rates:

• Was there enough information in the media kit?
• Was the price reasonable?
• Was the pricing options easy to understand?

The advertiser interface is now capable of being viewed in Spanish and soon other languages will be available.

An advertiser can now select their geo-targeted cities by using our auto-suggester input field.  The cities correspond to the cities available in the OpenX MaxMind geoIP database; 2.2 million cities.

This allows local advertisers to geo-target the correct cities and not worry about spelling mistakes.