Let me share an interesting experience in promotion of a mobile game.

1. Introduction

I am going to describe all the benefits and of course show the final results. The example will be the mobile game Quick Brain which is available for Android и iOS. Quick Brain Android was released the first that’s why its possibilities differ considerably from iOS version.

I have been always kept by the thoughts that everyone’s talking about high returns in contrast with Android. I just couldn’t resist such attractive prospects and started more active refinement of iOS version in order to feel less embarrassed about it.

After Google play iOS has become an absolutely new field for the games for me. During my comparative experiment I’ve found out that iOS version can bring comparable earnings to Android with daily audience 3 to 10 times less depending on the country.

2. Rules of the game

Google play

This year Google play has made at least two major changes that directly influence on your application.

The design of the mobile version of the store was updated

The search and ranking algorithms of the store have changed. Some failures in Google play also took place.

According to the comments of experts, all of June Google Play was experimenting on ranking and search. Many developers started to notice an unusual drop in installations.

App Store

To get in Top App Store isn‘t so easy. Unfortunately, this is a reality for many developers. If your application isn’t in the “top”, it’s difficult to make a profit. You can buy motivated or unmotivated traffic, start your own advertising campaigns and reviews, optimize keywords, descriptions, screenshots, etc., you can get on Apple’s featuring, but it requires much time and effort.

Very often payback is one of the main things for developers. I decided that it’s enough to conduct my own advertising campaign with the help of Facebook to assess payback and real potential of the project.

3. Promotion of the iOS application

I will tell you about my promotion of the iOS application. You can also read about my previous experience with Android here.

Purpose

You should be able to define clearly the main purpose. Our budget was limited by 2000 euros. The primary target was to run the ad in three countries (Germany, Russia, the USA) to determine the country in which we could easier get in the top. Then we decided to remove unnecessary countries to concentrate the efforts on the one which has better results. It was important to get in the top as fast as possible in order to test organic installs growth and also to understand how long will last advertising performance in the long term.

Preparation of the application

First of all I started with the translations into German. The blog owner Frederik Schrader not only helped me to improve the translations but also prepared marketing materials and texts.

Moreover, he shared an interesting experience of his partners’ websites promotion such as MyHab or website for word generators to make words from letters for different word games.

I think that Frederik won’t refuse to help you.

Advertising place

It was comfortable for me to use Facebook Ads Manager. The tool is familiar to me because right there I managed to achieve low CPI, especially in Instagram.

Below you can find two variants of the post that were used for my ad:

People start active discussing of such posts which raise some questions. It increases the ad relevance and CPI becomes cheaper. If you want to be in the top quickly, you need to get as many installs as possible. For this goal you have to increase maximum payment for install that you can give away or improve your ad posts and marketing materials on the page of the store in order to attract more people with the same money.

It is important to understand that a user goes through the long way before install. First of all our target user makes a decision to go to the page in AppStore from the ad, then estimate an icon, screenshots and only then decides on installation. On the way it’s very important not to have weaknesses which lead to great losses in traffic.

Facebook Ads manager screen for iOS

Take care of your icon, screenshots and description in advance. I failed to achieve good results CPI for the USA and Germany, that’s why I decided exclude them and concentrated on Russia. During 12 days Russian Top has grown rapidly, you can see it on a graph. During advertising campaign top has been held for some time, but after finishing the rates started to fall.

Google analytics screen with active users stats

Aim your advertisment on your target audience. You can test it advertising the same but for different age, interest, country and other groups. So you’ll find the most effective audience and will not spend extra money on attraction. Don’t be lazy to do that.

From my own experience I concluded that for successful promotion you need combination of the following factors:

For applications with high retention

After advertising users will continue to play for a long time and bring profit in the near future. Check it out on a small audience. How long does it take to recoup the costs.

For application with low retention

In this case you should try to find the most adequate way to earn as much as possible at the very beginning. Interested users will continue to use the app even with tough monetization and probably your ad can bring profit at once, then you can continue to advertise all the time.

Of course if you want to get money from you project, but remember that negative feedbacks are is guaranteed to you!

AppAnnie history of rates for Russia after ads campany

4. Results

1720 euros were spent, 18000 users were involved (Russia 90%, Germany 6%, the USA 4 %) for 12 days in a row with equal distribution of installs by days.

Russia was the cheapest country from the list to involve new users (Russia CPI -0.09, Germany CPI — 0.18, the USA — 0.19) taking into account rates of return per 1000 target ads.

The results achieved for Russia: Trivia games — the 1st place, Puzzles — the 5th, Games — the 15th, All — the 69th place. It wasn’t enough users in the USA and Germany for getting organic installs.

During advertising campaign 20000 organic installs were done + 18000 through advertising. Thus 52% of organic installs were achieved due to advertising campaign.

Maximum payback 70% from the start of advertising campaign, the costs haven’t paid off yet, but I hope it can pay off in 3–4 months.

After advertising campaign the number of active users has grown by 5 times in comparison with the period without advertisement. From 200–300 to 1000–1400 active users a day.

Interstitial AdMob in Russia for iOS brings 3 times more income than Android, while CPI differs about by 1.4 times.

Tell us about your experience in advertising, what results have you achieved?