Developers know that you can’t wait for the hand of Nadella to reach down and anoint your app. If you want your app to succeed, you have to push it yourself — so if your marketing plan is “ASO” or “Get a feature from Microsoft”, you’re going to have a very bad time.

That means at the start of your app’s life, you have to get beta users excited, curry likes and upvotes, and attract press for your launch.

At a certain point, you’ll come to the horrible realization that your app’s user base isn’t going to grow any further without reinvesting some of your hard-earned app money into paid advertisements.

But how do you allocate your budget? We decided to find out by throwing some money at five paid channels, plus our own inventory. We tried to spend at least $100 on each channel on campaigns restricted to the US and Canada. (Why such small budgets? Read on to find out.)

Prologue: Picking the right app

A few weeks before writing this piece, we launched Calbot, a cute calendar app with a conversational interface. The app was a passion project that we never expected to release, so we didn’t build community support or press buzz for its launch. That meant a paid marketing budget was mandatory if we wanted to get the word out.

Here’s the short version of the lesson that came next: don’t pay to market your just-launched passion project.

The stuff we skipped turned out to be mandatory, and we ended up spending around $10 cost per install (CPI) on all channels (for a free app!) — even Photoshopped Young Bill Gates, our winsome ad creative at the top of this post, couldn’t move Calbot installs for us. The general Microsoft Store audience isn’t mature enough yet to appreciate your weird niche hipster app. (I hear that strategy works on macOS, maybe try it there?)

So, on to the next app. We knew from past campaigns that one of our apps, Duplicate Cleaner Pro, performs well enough on paid traffic. We put it on sale for free (100% off), bought ads for it, and are publishing those results instead. We didn’t plan on making any money, but since the app asked each new user to review the app, we were guaranteed to at least get the benefit of a few decent ratings out of this experiment.

Facebook “app install” ads: Actually just CPC