I released an app with an iAd in it on Friday. So far it has generated zero impressions with many requests - a fill rate of zero. Most of my requests are in the USA (~90%) so the problem is not that the requests are from countries which iAd does not support).
An older app of mine which is less popular is consistently generating a 98% fill rate despite a lower number of requests.
I was just wondering if it's normal for iAd apps to not generate impressions right away. Should I expect to eventually get impressions after some time, or is something wrong?
It takes 1-4 days for an app to start receiving ads. It's normal1 for the fill rate to be zero or nearly zero for a few days after release.
1: This is not documented on Apple's website anywhere, but Apple iAd representatives confirmed this via email.
Yes it is normal and documented.Have you read - https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/iAd_Guide/Introduction/Introduction.html
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Recently observing that 4 hour browse to watch, multi app performance and cert performance tests are only navigating and not playing any content. This was working on same code till last week. We tried few things and find out that if brand name is not passed then most of the time test behaves as expected. Has anything changed on YouTube backend?
For the questions about YouTube, please reach out to your Technical Account Manager at YouTube.
I have an issue where Google Analytics shows just fine data for all other browsers but then for iOS (specifically version 9.3+), Google Analytics show a high bounce rate. Now I am very aware of the recent iOS bug however, Apple released a fix to this and yet, I still have these weird statistics.
Can anyone provide any clues or possibilities iOS is showing this kind of stat?
You could take a look at the page load time, and see if that's any different on iOS. Check the source report to see if iOS traffic is typical. Also, look at the volumes. If they're very low, you may be seeing warped results.
Another possibility is traffic from your own company; for sites with only a few hundred visitors a day, excluding internal traffic can have a noticeable effect on Bounce Rate, but since this is phone traffic it might be slipping through the filter.
We actually tested this and it seems it's because of this: https://github.com/PierBover/ios-iframe-fix
I recently came across an app in the app store called Dataman Pro. It has a feature that lets you see the data usage per app basis (see the attached screenshot). I have been wondering what is it doing to get this sort of information.
See this post about getting the list of installed apps, and this git project.
Then about usage tracking:
If you wondered about any public APIs that give you network statistics out of the box - there's nothing there.
DataMan it self is an app that used to work in the background all the time, and bind to the network interfaces to track network usage. Which is one of the reasons that its data is never 100% accurate as it is not guaranteed to always work in the background. This is also the reason Apple kicked it from the AppStore after a few versions...
Now that app has returned, if I understand correctly, after making a few changes: Mainly avoiding "hacks" to stay in background, and using Location Services to get back online when the user moves around. I guess this is another hack but one that Apple did not oppose to, yet.
Edit:
After looking around the web for a bit, it seems that Apple found that trick also, and removed many apps from the AppStore due to staying in the background by using location. I guess right now it's not working more than 10 minutes in the background, so you open it when you want to measure current Activity, and it stops measuring after 10 minutes.
About the tracking code itself, its mainly C code, using CFNetwork framework, and you can find some answers on stackoverflow on this subject.
More, in response to comment:
Well, the part about seeing the installed apps list, and foreground app, is not exactly private APIs, but private plist, as you mentioned.
Apps which access private files do get through from time to time. When Apple finds that some "private" files are accessed and need to be kept safer - they change it in an iOS update, like they did with the call history file, which is sensitive. Old apps tended to use (around iOS <= 3.3) the call history db to do some stats, and on iOS4 they were obsolete by the file moving to a secure location.
Reading "private" files which are unprotected is pretty easy to do without getting caught by automatic analyzers.
When you know which is the foreground app, and you can count current network usage, you can associate it with the app... And get an estimation. So this is how they do it, most likely.
However, The techniques change from time to time, due to Apple re-reviewing apps and their own policies, and due to API changes, and if you track the history of such apps and even this specific app - you will see that from time to time they get kicked off of the AppStore and return with a twist. They adjust... So no technique is reliable and this is a major headache to maintain, which is probably why the developer charges 9.99$ for it. I would.
I'm wondering if anyone has requested and actually received an API key for the Google Maps iOS SDK. I put in my own request over a month ago now, and still nothing despite having a shipping app that is ready to make immediate use of the new SDK (and which is picking up some negative feedback due to inaccuracies in Apple's maps).
Has anyone been issued an API key for the Google iOS SDK, and if so, how long did you have to wait for it and what were the circumstances of your application (i.e. did you have an app already deployed, how popular was it, etc.)?
I'm hoping that if we can unravel the criteria Google uses to issue these keys we can allow people with pending requests to come up with an approximate estimate of when their request might be granted.
As I mentioned in this answer, I applied for access on the 13th of December, and then received an email saying I'd been approved on the 17th of December.
I have an app on the app store which used to use Google Maps, but I had to remove the maps when iOS 6 came out. Not sure if this had anything to do with it, or if I was just lucky because I happened to hear about the SDK almost immediately after Google announced the new SDK, and I applied for access right away.
When I received the email saying that I'd been approved, I was added to a google group - which is how Google sends out notifications of updates. From the looks of it that group only has 77 members, so if that's equal to the number of people which have been given access, I guess Google are rolling out access quite slowly.
UPDATE:
As of the 21st of February, it looks like the SDK is now open to everyone.
While you are developing your application, iAd Network sends test
advertisements to your application. To assist you in validating your
implementation, the iAd Network occasionally returns errors to test
your error handling code. You can also test your error handling
support manually by turning your device’s wireless capability off.
Ok, it says the above in the developers guide, but in reality its failing more often than serving the test page, for 2 days now! I get a the test ad page once every 10 minutes it seems !!! Little disproportionate for testing.....
Is this how it's going to be in live? I don't want to be deploying my paid ap for free if it's not even going to send any ads!
Anyone got any experience of this?
By experience it is very variable in test environment, I've seen days as you describe and days with a good flow of ads. Now ... live it is very different, the "fill rate" as they call it (% of requests answered with and ad) is pretty low, maybe 2% on iPad and 5-10% on iPhone. Besides, iAd serves ads only in certain countries, ie. mostly in US and a bit in the UK, France, Italy, Spain, ... And by experience it serves more ads to the iPhone than iPad. My app on iPad received virtually nothing outside the US from iAd.
Now on the positive side, the remuneration of ads is the best for iAd when you have the chance to receive ads. I ended up implementing a fallback network (AdMob) when iad doesn't receive anything. I did that myself but read there is something called AdWhirl that seems to provide help on that.