• August 11, 2009

What can $15,000 buy you on AdMob? For Sherwin-Williams, an iPhone campaign of that size helped boost the ranking of its "Color Snap" app from No. 70 to No. 18 among free utilities apps in the App Store. The program allows people to take a picture of any color they see and match it with a Sherwin-Williams paint color.

According to a case study released by AdMob, the text-ad campaign the company ran over two days in May generated a 1.08% click rate on 11.9 million impressions and a 500% increase in downloads of the Color Snap app. AdMob did not disclose the actual number of downloads, but the smaller the initial figure, the less impressive the gain.

The 1% click rate for the CPC campaign would be high for online, but about what an advertiser might expect on mobile. As of Tuesday, the Color Snap had fallen back to No. 33 among utilities apps, but was still 50% higher than it ranked before the campaign, according to AdMob. -Mark Walsh