Promotion of applications in the AppStore (Google Play)

Before we wrote this material, our applications downloaded more than 2,000,000 times, we spent about 50 large promotional campaigns, visited the topstore of the AppStore in more than 24 countries until finally we collected all this into one big work flow. The article is almost no obvious things about keywords, the beauty of icons, screenshots and advertising campaigns. We tried to bring the work of the grocery company to a single model, answering the questions: “what?”, “When?”, “Why?” And even the question “and then what?”. If you are developing your own application, want to start doing it, or you simply have a friend, a developer or marketer of a grocery company, you will find a lot of useful information in this article.

Application Promotion Model

We have broken the application promotion model into several levels, following the example of the OSI network model.

• Basic level - the stage of product development, writing code and creating design.
• Key - the application is ready, the stage of placing the application in the AppStore, the selection of keywords, screenshots, icon, etc.
• Public - the application is already available for download by users or the exact release date of the product is known, work with journalists
• Advertising - the business itself, the calculation of profitability.

Below, each level will be reviewed separately. A lot of useful material on the promotion of applications can be found at http://Cool-Link.com

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A basic level of

At the Basic level, many key decisions are made, but since here we consider only the marketing part, we will not consider architecture and UX issues.

Everyone knows the conventional wisdom that marketing should be started long before the product enters the market, but few understand the essence of this statement. Yes, it is important to prepare press releases, draw a landing page and make a promotional video, of course. At the same time, when developing a product, we are already thinking of promoting the next and increasing the return to the current. What is mandatory for each of our products, what is added during the development phase?
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• Push noti fi cations - each product must request permission for push notifications, even when product functionality does not require it. To increase conversion, some products use an intermediate screen (as on the slide). As a result, with the help of push-notifications, you can remind the user about your product or advertise a new, pouring traffic. This has a number of advantages, which I will discuss next. To work with push, we use our own development and now we are switching to a very convenient service parse.com .
• Splash screen or banners - even if you have an advertising model of monetization, it is highly recommended to add the ability to include your own banners or full-screen ads. It should be controlled from the server, so you can remotely enable / disable advertising, as well as change advertising art and links.
• Email Subscription - email marketing is still a fairly effective promotion tool, with high conversion, besides, you never know who subscribed to an email newsletter. Perhaps this is the Washington Post journalist who will write an article about you. By the way, we got acquainted with one of our best partners, the Appadvice site, just after email.

Thus, if you have a product or a package of products, with the release of the next you can already get a lot of free traffic. And if you have a mono-brand company - you can release a series of products that support the core, but this is a topic for a separate article :)

Also, at the Basic level, pay special attention to analytics. In one article, it’s impossible to tell about it, so just short recommendations. For analytics, we recommend using Flurry , Google Analytics and Mixpanel (paid).

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Key level

This is the level of iTunes Connect, i.e. the place where you create the product face. About how to choose the right icon, draw selling screenshots and pick keywords, a million articles were written and there were thousands of reports. All this you can easily find, and if you have been engaged in application development for a long time, then you have already managed to get bored.


And here are some not entirely obvious tips:

• texts are better read if they are at the top of the screenshot (yes, we have the opposite :)) - keywords can and should be entered one by one, separated by commas, without spaces;
• above are the keywords that were able to be placed in the title, but not the entire name is entirely indexed by the search in the AppStore, approximately the first 100 characters;
• An old but relevant article about keywords HERE
• good presentation about keywords:

Also, on the Key level, you can use this method of increasing downloads, like lowering the price. If you put the cost of the application, say, $ 4, and then reset it to zero, then the number of downloads will increase: on different products we have this figure ranges from 1,000 free downloads to 80,000. When you return the price back, you get a short tail of sales. Of course, this cannot be called a business model, but if you provided for what you were talking about at the Basic level in your products, it’s not just a few thousand downloads and a couple of dollars, but a couple of thousand push devices and a couple of hundreds of new email subscribers. In the future, they will be able to bring you more than just selling the current product.

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Public level

Everything is more or less simple - it's cool, when large editions are written about you, you get a lot of downloads, don't pay money for it, and just entertain your pride. Yes, get acquainted with the press in advance, give them access to the beta version of the product via TestFlight or other services, ask for advice and so on, but there is one "but". Do not spend a lot of time on it. If you have good connections with the press - great, they will write about you, if you have a cool product - great, they will write about you, just let them know. Journalists read almost all correspondence, this is their work, but articles in major publications should not be an end in themselves, this should be a nice bonus. And if it is not there, nothing terrible. It is impossible to build a business that will rely solely on love of the press, but if it subsequently arises and it will work for you - great.

The largest Western blogs and almost all the resources of Uanet and Runet wrote about our Wallgram application. And here is the sales schedule:

This is a schedule without advertising and only paid version. You can easily see how sales have fallen the day after the main publications.

A list of the main sites to which you can send a press release is HERE . On the main site Cool-Link.com you will also find this link and many others.

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Advertising level

It is at this level that business begins. Here absolutely everything that you did on the previous levels is useful to you, and everything that you did not do will play against you. Advertising.


Application development is not an online store of plush toys, so the classic ROI formula is hardly suitable here, since the cost price of the current version of the product is static and its sales are constantly falling as sales increase. So for the advertising campaign, we chose a well-known formula from the physics course for the calculation of efficiency - efficiency. The beauty of application development is that in the real world, the efficiency cannot be greater than 1, and in the AppStore it can and should be greater.


It is logical that to increase the efficiency of an advertising campaign, you need to work on increasing the average income from the user and reducing the cost of attracting it.

So And - the average income from the user:


"A" is calculated as the ratio of profit for the period to the number of all users. Those. if the application, conditionally, for the month brought $ 10,000, and it was loaded by 100,000 people, then A = 10,000/100,000 = $ 0.1 or 10 cents. Returning to the previous formula, in order for the business model to work, it is necessary that user engagement be LESS than 10 cents, which is unlikely, so you need to increase A.

• Increase conversion - at the Basic level, we added analytics and immediately begin to count the funnels - a sequence of user actions, after which it begins to pay or perform the desired action. And then - individually for each product - if we see that 40% of users see the purchase screen, but only 3% make a purchase, change the wording, pictures, and so on - there is no panacea here, alas.
• Safe price increase. It is logical that if 100 people paid us a dollar, then we earned $ 100, but if we increase the price to two dollars, then less people will pay us, for example, 70, but these 70 will bring us $ 140, which is $ 40 more than the original $ 100. But if after the price doubled, only 30 users began to pay ($ 60 dollars of profit in the same example), then this price is no longer effective.
• Change business model. Perhaps users are not willing to pay for what you sell, but are willing to pay for what you give for free. The analyst is again on the scene, where you can clearly see what your users need.
• Changing the wording - this item also applies to the analysis of funnels, but rendered separately, as you may need to add a psychological trick. For example, in our Image Transfer application, there were only two items on the purchase screen - Buy the full version for $ 2.99 or use a product with a restriction. Conversion was very low. After we added “Additional features”, such as “Remove restrictions on photos for $ 2.99”, “Remove restrictions on videos for $ 1.99” or “Remove ALL restrictions for $ 2.99”, i.e. it is obvious that it is much more profitable to remove all restrictions. In this case, there are always users who remove the restriction on the video, and then, separately, remove the restrictions on the photo, thus paying $ 4 for the product instead of $ 3. There were even two users who later separately bought the paid version of the product :)
• Localization. English, of course, is an international language, but not everyone knows it, which can provide low conversion. If you see that you have a lot of downloads, for example, in France and at the same time low conversion, it is probably worth thinking about localization into French.

Example wording change:


By and large, here you need to work exclusively with conversion, since you cannot reduce N - the number of users, they have already downloaded your product.

Reducing Q - the cost of attracting users.
It is not enough just to choose an advertising network in which users will cost you the cheapest, since different traffic sources have different conversions. So, in one ad network, a user can cost you 10 cents, but the average profit from this cohort will be 5 cents, i.e. Efficiency = 0.5, and in the other - it will cost $ 1, but the cohort will bring in an average of $ 1.2, i.e. Efficiency = 1.2.


How can I reduce Q:

• Creating your own promotion channels. What you should have done at the Basic level: push-notifications, advertising of a new product in previous ones, email-sending - all this reduces the cost of Q, since This traffic can be considered conditionally free, or you have already paid for it. Also in new products you can convert users who have not paid you in the previous one. You can create satellites - small products, designed exclusively for generating traffic.
• Increase advertising budget. Indeed, increasing the advertising budget, you increase the number of downloads, and by increasing the number of downloads, you go up higher in the search results for keywords and even fall into the general tops. Once in general tops and increasing your position in the search results, you increase the number of organic, i.e. free, downloads, which means reducing Q. So, you paid an ad network, for example, $ 10,000 for 10,000 users, that is, the cost of a user was $ 1, but thanks to organic traffic, you received a total of 15,000 downloads, that is, user is already $ 0.6.
• Selection of the optimal channel of attraction. Everything is simple here - give up attraction channels with low efficiency, everything is very similar to ROI.
• Partnership with other developers. If your colleagues have also provided for the Basic level, they will agree to advertise on their products. Sometimes it can significantly reduce the cost of attraction.
• Gradual increase in advertising budget - crescendo. Since the App Store uses a weighted average number of downloads over a period, the most effective advertising campaigns are developing on an incremental basis - the first day of 3K downloads, the next 5K, the next 10K, and so on, and not 15K right away, so you have a chance to get into Tops and save through organic traffic.
• Journalists. Yes, if you did manage to negotiate with the press, this is a great way to reduce the cost of users, since journalists give you leads for free.

Of course, the presented model is not a panacea, a lot depends on the product itself, the time of its release, relevance, vacuum, etc., but it’s vital to know if you want to build a business on this.

It is important to understand that the advertising model for premium products, i.e. paid, does not work in its pure form. Attracting a user will always be more expensive than he pays for a paid product. And at the same time, there is always an opportunity to offset the costs due to organic downloads. You can use the fmium model even in a paid product. We consider the subscription to be the most effective model at the moment, i.e. the user pays you all the time to use the product, thanks to this business model you can afford a much higher user cost, because and the profit from it at a distance will be much more.

Even if the advertising model for your products does not work, the previous levels of promotion still remain working. In almost all of our products we use both models - freemium and premium. So, our Photo and Video Transfer is a paid application without any restrictions, and Image Transfer is a completely identical application, but free, although it has built-in purchases, at the moment the income from both models is about the same.

Now that we have understood a bit about the theory of application promotion, it's time to return to Cool-Link.com , read a few more articles from industry gurus and start practicing.

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O CapableBits

CapableBits has been developing its own applications for over 4 years. At the beginning of 2014, we opened a mobile application publishing direction - if you have a product or it is under development and you want it to start making money, send us a request to publisher@capablebits.com . More information on our website CapableBits.com