Free ways to promote Android applications

Hello! In this topic, I would like to discuss one of the most interesting and at the same time mysterious topics for most, I think, indie developers are the promotion of their own applications. I will say a few words about myself: I have been doing Android development for about 2 years (only as a hobby, really). I have a dozen applications in the Play Store, with a cumulative number of downloads of more than 5 million. Neither that would be very much, and most of the downloads fall on one application, but I made some conclusions regarding marketing. Here I want to share my experience, observations, as well as encourage you to talk about your results in the comments. Exchange of experience in this matter would be useful to everyone, I think.

Another digression that I want to do: I specifically put the word “free” in the title. It is clear that you can buy downloads, reviews, advertising, reviews, or even go to the publisher (if you have something worthwhile). But here I propose to look at the issue from the point of view of the developers who deal with this mainly for the fun of it. I do not have any budgets for my games, and I don’t think that in the near future it will become a business for me, where you can (and should) invest money.

Application page in the Play Store

I will start with the “face” of any application - its pages in the Play Store. There are several important points that you need to pay attention to when placing:
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• Icon. This has already been said many, many times, the icon is the most important in design. No matter how wonderful your game is, the player will never know about it unless a successful icon attracts his attention.
• Description. It is important to write a search-optimized description. New users coming "from search" - this is almost all that we have left after we saw out "Just In". Many are not soared and just append tags at the end. Please note that this is a violation of the rules and potentially you can get a ban for it, although I have not heard of any such case.
• Translation of the description. The description must be translated into the main languages, even if there are no other options besides auto-translation. It is not by chance that I single it out as a separate item; this is really important for increasing the number of downloads.
• Headline You have 30 characters for the title, try to use them most effectively. It doesn't have to be the name of the game “one to one”, be creative! Remember that the game with a keyword in the title, in the search results will almost certainly be higher than the rest.
• Screenshots I think everything here is as obvious as with the icon, try to make them as attractive as possible, show your application from the best angle! Do not forget about the possibility of post-processing screenshots.
• Video. Video is necessary, even gameplay-video "from the phone" is better than its complete absence. If you have enough skills to make a full trailer, that’s great!
• Icon for the "Featured" section. Of course, you should not expect to get into Featured, but as part of the design of the page of your application, the promotional picture should also not be neglected.

About the application / game itself I can say the following: make a request to vote inside! Many users install an application from the web-store (on a PC, and you can vote only from a smartphone / tablet) and if they are not reminded, they will never search for your application page themselves to put their 5 stars. Such a request can be made in the form of a dialogue when leaving or after passing a certain number of levels, for example. Just do not forget that the reward for voting is also a violation of the rules.

Cross-promotion

The next part is cross-promotion. I use admob house ads. Advice that I would give here: target your traffic! Put in the settings of the advertising company "US", if you see that the application grows only in the Russian top. Notice that in order for house ads to work, there should be a lot of impressions. For example, 100,000 impressions with a good CTR ~ 1% = 1000 clicks. I, unfortunately, do not have exact statistics, but according to the sensations only about 10% of clicks are converted into installations. That is, we get 100 installations per 100,000 impressions, this is the kind of mathematics.

There are also various banner exchange networks, such as tapfortap.com, swappit.com, belugaboost.com. I haven’t made up my opinion on their account, the same tapfortap did not work for me personally the first time. In any case, here you can get 1000 impressions of your banner just for registration, as they say "with the world on a thread ...".

What sites should pay attention to when publishing reviews?

For Russian-speaking users, everything is simple - it's w3bsit3-dns.com. There is a forum where even though they require apk to be placed (and we are mostly interested in direct downloads from the Play Store), however, you can always get a lot of feedback, and sometimes very useful feedback. There is also a project to support our developers , in which you can publish a free review of your application in the news feed on the main page. By the way, a lot of smaller resources of the Runet draw materials from this forum, which also gives us a plus.

With English-speaking users, everything is somewhat more complicated, here are the sites I selected for myself:

• forum.xda-developers.com is a very visited resource, the only disadvantage of which is mainly developers and other geeks. There was an interesting case with my previous game: apparently someone from the administration noticed it on the forum and posted a short note on the main xda-developers.com. This gave a great push and the very next day the game was in the first place in the “Hot apps” on appbrain.com (portal with ratings), which also had a very positive effect on the dynamics of downloads! As a result, the application turned out to be in the Russian TOP-20 and American TOP-100, which is quite not bad for a toy “for a week”, I think.
• reddit.com - try, it definitely makes sense. There are several Android subreddits.
• The forum on androidpit.com is like a visited resource, although you should not expect anything special.
• Mobilism.org is an analogue of w3bsit3-dns.com, but with a smaller audience (I do not give a link, since they have very aggressive ads on the page). They also need to upload apk.

In addition, of course you should not forget about social networks: Facebook, G +, Twitter, etc. Add socialization to the game, whether it's tweeting about a game achievement or posting a record in Openfeint - all this has a positive effect on distribution, and you are only a few lines of code, by and large.

Regarding the sites specializing in the publication of reviews, I had experience with only two. This is a well-known droider.ru, at that time the review did not give anything, BUT, the game was frankly weak. Rather, the idea was not bad (at least I really want to believe in it), but the graphic design, visual style was not successful, not suitable. Funny detail: the erotic version of the same game showed quite good results until it was banned by Google. The second is appeggs.com, they wrote to me with a proposal to place the game in the “Top Recommendation” in exchange for their link in the game description on the Play Store. In general, it is sometimes quite difficult to understand what ultimately caused a chain reaction in the form of an application getting into “Hot apps” (AppBrain) or “Gaining popularity” (Google Play), and from there to the TOP. For example, for me it remains a big mystery why my last game was suddenly very popular in Mexico.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I would like to recommend (if anyone does not know) a good site that collects Play Store statistics by country: appannie.com . If you add to this statistics from the Developer Console plus AdMob statistics - you get a great tool to always keep your finger on the pulse.