Couch marketing of a mobile game (120.000 installations in the first month. Coincidence?)

Have you often heard the phrase “I'm not going to spend a penny on promotion”, “a good game sells itself”, “those guys succeeded, and I will succeed”, and a little later - “the game did not go”, “in the market no place for an independent loner ”,“ the golden time of indie games is over ”?



Everyone wants to believe in the success of their game, that it will rush into the tops and become a new hit, bringing light to the people and prosperity to the developers. But at the same time, no one is in a hurry to risk money to help the game make a good start. “What if you don’t fly?”, “I don’t understand marketing!”, “I’m a developer, I don’t want to promote anything, I want a chick-chick and production!”



I have never liked such an approach, so at the start we spent a little on inept “couch” marketing. And our first game did not fail. I beat the costs, earned the top, got great reviews - 5 stars in ( AppStore ) and 4.7 in ( GooglePlay ), and even after 9 months is not in a hurry to go to the “Death Valley” applications. But now, seeing such a response from the audience, there are doubts - was there really a sense in our small “PR-campaign” or were we just lucky? Survivor error? Coincidence? Maybe, having got into the top of the new GooglePlay, we would have found our players anyway?

')

I will set out the facts, show the graphs and figures, and I propose to draw conclusions together in the comments - would the game unwind itself or would nobody know about it without promotion?



Here are the daily installation schedules for the first month. We only worked hard on the first week. In the plate a brief summary of the daily marks on the charts:

	date	Spent (rub.)	Settings on GooglePlay	Settings in the AppStore
one	03.12.2015, Th	4.982	7	67
2	03/13/2015, Fri	0	77	133
3	3/14/2015 Sat	11.647	1736	1989
four	03.15.2015, sun	0	517	755
five	03.03.2015, Mon	9.600	2996	2321
6	03.17.2015, Tue	1,300	1217	1088
7	03.03.2015, Th	16.000	3417	769
eight	03.22.2015, Sun	500	4001	427
	Total:	44.029	13968	7549

Now a little more on each tag:



[0]

- March 11, launch simultaneously on iOS and Android. Why at the same time? To use each advertising channel to the maximum

[ one ]

- They told about the game to friends, social activity, repost - that's all.

- email-mailing through ispreadnews.ru to all sorts of sites that write reviews on games. Why use the service? Because lazy. It was worth $ 40 + $ 40 (for each platform, 4982 rubles. At that rate), if not mistaken. Impressions - mixed. On the one hand, here I am lazy and did not want to look for all the necessary contacts and fill out forms myself, but they just solve my problem. On the other hand, all the same it is necessary to do it with pens and purposefully in an amicable way. Plus, here you do not see who exactly already wrote, and who does not. I do not regret, but do not leave the feeling that I spent here inefficiently

[2]

- Post an article about a bold experiment with monetization in the game. The article was well received, it was so successful that in the second comment there were links to the game and there were about 3000 transitions for them in the first week.

- Correspondence with site administrators who respond to the newsletter

[3]

- The first review, from appsad.ru, and free! The administrator of the resource really liked the game, so he wrote and published a review for free. But we decided to still play a couple of iTunes gift cards among the players, it cost 1647 rubles. Not many people came from this review right away, but throughout the year search traffic was constantly present, according to the administrator.

- A post in the public “Lepre” Vkontakte (vk.com/leprum, with the original Lepre is not connected in any way, as far as I know) The post cost 9750rub. and I very much doubted his account, but the return justified all expectations! For two hours, on Saturday morning, 350 likes and 20 reposts, per day - 650 and 30, respectively. This is very good for advertising in communities, as it turned out. And the surge of installations on this day is primarily the merit of the post. The most amazing thing is that I later met many of my own friends and acquaintances (not added to “friends”), who installed the game precisely by the post from this public!

- There was another post in the public school “Old School” (vk.com/oldschool90e, corresponds to the subject of the game itself) for 250 rubles, he scored about 35 likes and a couple of reposts.

[ four ]

- Free review from ipadstory.ru.

[ five ]

- Review on the site MacDigger.ru. Cost 4500 rubles. It is difficult to say whose main merit of the peak on this day is perhaps mackigger.

- Posts in communities “Back to the 90s” (vk.com/vk.ninetieth, 600rub.), “Android” (vk.com/toysandroid, 1500rub.) And “Apple” (vk.com/blog_apple, 3000rub. ) - quite large living communities, but I can not accurately determine the impact, unfortunately.

[6]

- A post in the public “Dashing 90s” (vk.com/lixie, 1300 rub.) - in a day 160 likes and 14 reposts to the post.

[7]

- Review from w3bsit3-dns.com.ru, comprehensive promotion for 16000rub (with banners on the main and other buns). For some reason I pinned great hopes on him and the review was quite good. And even their audience did not eat us alive, which I feared. But, as can be seen from the graphs, some dramatic surge did not happen here. But such an article on a large resource affects the indexing by search engines and in principle it is a long story. But I will not order more complex promotion for a mobile game, perhaps. In fact, the same post in the Lepro-community gave a better return. Yes, we are not very much in the audience of the resource, apparently.

[ eight ]

- Post in one of the developer communities, it did not give much effect.



Something like this. Confused, spontaneous, unsystematic. But the experience and results are interesting.



And now the funniest thing is that this first week after the release, if my memory serves me, we were not on the Google Play application lists, that is, the market simply did not index us and did not add them until the 19th. And, having appeared in the “top of new free games” of our category, we just reached the “plateau” and received 3.5-4k installations per day on GooglePlay for another 2-3 weeks. And in iTunes, as you can see, they also reached the plateau, but more modest - 500-700 installations per day. At the same time, we sat down pretty tightly in the top 10 of our category and it was from there that we got organic (screenshots from AppAnnie.com: iOS and Android ).



For 9 months, we received 125.000 installations in the AppStore:



And 450.000 in GooglePlay (all these ups and downs are Google's quirks, “recommended” selections, etc., we had no effect on this):





What do you think? Was this “PR” justified or a waste of money? Did he help us not to fall in the future or was it all the merit of the game itself and the traffic received from the “new” ones? Maybe you had a similar experience?



PS For myself, I will try to answer these questions by experiment - by launching a similar game ( GooglePlay and AppStore ) with the same progress. It started a week ago, there will be a report in a week, but for now you can bet on “take off / not take off”.