Couch marketing of a mobile game, part 2 (VK publics, paid reviews, cross-promo)

In the meantime, we continue modest experiments with the budget promotion of our mobile crafts in Russia and share with you the numbers. This time we’ll try to swing a small but proud cinema quiz parallel to GooglePlay and the AppStore , answering the following questions along the way:

• Did we get lucky last time or does the circuit really work?
• Publicity Advertising VC - should I use? Average installation price?
• Reviews on domestic sites - is there any point? Prices?
• Conversion of players from one game to another?

Spoiler:

• Yes, lucky; no, it does not work
• It is, ~ 10-15rub. for installation
• Expensive, inefficient, little sense
• ~ 4%

And now more:

A year ago, as the first experimental application, we did a small quiz, minimally invested in the promotion and the game, contrary to expectations, did not fail, and generated 100k installations in the AppStore and 300k in GooglePlay in six months. There was a logical desire to repeat success. Ok, we do similar application and we turn the same marketing manipulations. We look what happened.
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The main goals and guidelines were as follows:

• We run simultaneously on both platforms to maximize the use of each advertising post.
• With the help of traffic from the public, we get into the new GooglePlay, we emerge in the top of our category and then we already hope for Google algorithms, automatic collections, recommendations, etc. + We are trying to get to the top category in the AppStore (there is no automatic selection with new items)
• The game is about cinema, so we aim at thematic publics associated with the film industry
• With the help of reviews on sites, we get the “tail” of installations and indexing by search engines
• ?????
• PROFIT

No sooner said than done. Here is the schedule of daily installations of the application for the first month, and in the table below is a brief summary of day-marks:

	date	Spent (rub.)	Settings on GooglePlay	Settings in the AppStore	Spent / Install
one	13.12.15	-	15	eleven	-
2	12/14/15	2990	152	152	9.84 rub.
3	12/15/15	5200	197	129	15.95 rub.
four	12/16/15	12500	501	263	16.36 rub.
five	12/17/15	12749	686	334	12.5 rub.
6	12/18/15	3899	276	222	7.83 rub.
7	12/19/15	9750	1154	653	5.40 rub.
eight	12/20/15	-	313	262	-
9	12/21/15	2500	145	106	9.96 rub.
ten	12/22/15	12500	123	188	40.19 rub.
eleven	12/23/15	9900	620	193	12.18 rub.
12	12/24/15	14,500	532	326	17.00 rub.
13	12.25.15	3000	351	179	5.66 rub.
14	12/26/15	-	152	74	-
	Total:	89488	4737	2745	~ 12rub / install

Yes, there is no tracking in the application, so the installation information is “dirty” and it is not entirely correct to consider the installation cost as “spent per day / install per day”, but the order of the amounts can be estimated

Happened?

No, it was not possible to repeat the launch history of the previous project. We got to the 6th place in our category in the AppStore, but there was an unpleasant thing with GooglePlay ...

We have never appeared anywhere in the GooglePlay catalog, either in new products or in the top of its category at least at the bottom, i.e. the game could only be found through a search or a direct link. And the games that came out later with 5-10 installations were new, and we with thousands of players didn’t ... At first I decided that maybe Google needed time to index the application. But a week has passed, two months, we have already squandered the entire budget, but the catalog has not surfaced. At this point, it was already decided to restart the game, because The situation is clearly not healthy, but it was still not clear what happened and why we flew past the directory.

And then the developer of the Intellect-battlle application wrote to me, saying that they had exactly the same situation - they started the game, caught up with a bit of traffic, but never appeared. In the support, both they and us were answered roughly the same way: “guys, formally getting into the catalog and top categories is not guaranteed, technically everything is OK, try your best”. As a result, agreed on the assumption that the root of the problem lies in the haggling of the name - we have “Remember the Movie”, they have some variation with the word “Millionaire”, and in the market there are hundreds of “films” and “millionaires”, respectively, Google ignored. This is not accurate, but the most working hypothesis. In general, we renamed our games, started a new Bundle ID, restarted, and literally in 24 hours appeared wherever it was expected. I hope someone reads this story, edits its unnecessarily “SEO” name before launch and does not step on our rake

Another obvious reason for failure is trite, the game is not so good as to crack the word of mouth and shake the algorithms of recommendations of the stores. This is just a sturdy quiz game. Yes, with a unique feature in the form of audio tips, but for a potential player it looks like “another quiz about the movie”. Moreover, we have something to compare - if you look at the dynamics of the previous launch , you can see that the same channels, for example, macdigger.ru, w3bsit3-dns.com, the public of “Lepre” generated 1.5 times less installations this time. That is, less people became interested in advertising, and then from those who are interested, a smaller percentage actually got involved in the game.

Well, the strategic plan failed, it happens, but then we have the results of working with two channels of promotion.

VK groups

Pros: cheap, live players, easy to scale, almost no moderation, easy to target
Minuses: the post hangs only 1 hour, then it is lost, it is a lot of bots, it is difficult to estimate the percentage of the live audience, the fads of the admins

Reviews on sites

Pros: indexing by search engines, reviews do not disappear anywhere, you can agree for free
Cons: expensive, not very efficient, bad text found, endangered format as a whole

In principle, I was pleased with the reviews on macdigger.ru and w3bsit3-dns.com.ru - a good return for my money, and extremely discouraged by the results of publications on the resources of the i10 group (Planet iPhone and AndroidInsider) - high prices, mediocre text, no exhaust. The rest of the minor reviews are also a waste of money, apparently, but at least the amounts there are not so exaggerated.

I am sure there are publications with a large lively audience, enjoying great prestige among the readers, but it is hardly possible to come to them with a little unknown mobile game. By the way, the publication on tech.onliner.by can ensure that you get into the Top Overall AppStore in Belarus, checked.

Current state of affairs

After the restart and termination of marketing activity, the installation did not fall to zero, but where did the traffic come from? There are two options: “tail” from publications + search traffic or cross-promo from the first game. Ok, let's compare the number of daily application settings (dark line) with the number of cross-promo links (light line):

The correlation of one with the other is obvious, so now the second application lives almost exclusively due to cross-promo from the first, and the tail from marketing, the catalog, the search - all this is in front of the error. Approximately 15% of all players of the first application follow a cross-promo link, and only ~ 23% of the applications that have moved to the page eventually install it. Total 0.15 * 0.23 * 100 = 4%, we expected a large conversion, of course.

Conclusion

Yes, it was not possible to repeat the previous success, but we received answers to some questions and a lot of experience, which means the next attempt will be more effective. I hope some readers will also benefit from this experience.

Next bold (and someone will say "recklessly risky" ... and be right!) Experiments with YouTube and the bloggers living on it. If all this is interesting to you, we will definitely share our experience and our own impressions.