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We launch the application for Android Part 2 - finance, promotion (from personal experience)



I continue the article about the experience of developing and launching a mobile application, without personal programming experience. The first part, in which I described the emergence of an idea, the search for a programmer, prototyping, development and launch, is available here .

In the second part I will talk about:

Before turning to the article on the merits, I will make a small digression.
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Why am I writing all this? I am writing this because there’s a lot of practical information about monetization, promotion, and development on the Internet. Before immersing in this project, I spent more than one hour searching for information that could help answer the questions: do it or not, how much income can you expect, how much does application development cost? I can’t say that there’s an informational vacuum, but there’s very little practical experience, so I’m sharing, making up.
So…

Finance


I would conditionally divide the costs in our case into four parts:
  1. Hired development
  2. Wage filling
  3. Pay promotion
  4. Own resources

Hired development : in the sum, the development of an application + server part for content creation + a couple of updates with functional adjustments from the first reviews, cost us 20,000 rubles. According to my estimates, the programmer's labor costs amounted to 40-60 working hours. The programmer, is a second year student of our Krasnoyarsk University, worked in his free time from study and session time. Development, from start to launch, took about 2 months.

Hired content : the starting volume of materials for launch (approximately 3000 articles of cheat sheets) we did with our partner independently, so this refers to our own resources, about them below. After the launch, taking into account the wishes and feedback in the market, as well as relying on our own understanding of the educational process and the popularity of subjects, we hired a person to “fill in” the material base with up to 6000 articles of cheat sheets. It cost us 8,000 rubles, the work completion period is about a month. Artist - familiar mommy on maternity leave, labor costs about 2-3 hours per day for filling.

Paid promotion : In order to ensure the launch installations and not stay with 30-40 users, we made some efforts. More information about the promotion below, but the financial part was about 2,000 rubles. This money was spent on advertising in VK.

Own resources : From its resources, which are conditionally free, it was spent:

I find it difficult to accurately assess these resources in rubles. Given the higher prices and the fact that own time is priceless, we take the cost of these resources at 10,000 rubles, such an assessment should not underestimate the costs, we get:
Development:20 000 rub.
Filling:8 000 rub.
Promotion:2 000 rub.
Its resources:10 000 rubles
Total:40 000 rub.

In the comments, I am ready to answer questions about finances, including charges of colluding with Google and Yandex in order to create a monopoly position of employers on the labor market and thereby save on the work of programmers.

Promotion


The following resources were used for promotion:

Standard advertising VK
In my opinion, Vkontakte provides a very good platform for advertising mobile applications.
The advantages are a large audience reach, high opportunities for social and geo-targeting, flexible adjustment of budgets and prices for advertising, statistics not only on clicks, but also on installations.
Cons - not always adequate moderation. Here I mean that the same ad can be rejected for different reasons or be accepted without comment, it depends, as far as I understand, on the moderator, his competence and mood.

The ad we advertised looked like this:


I have never seen such ads in VK, I suppose they are shown only to users from mobile platforms, in our case from Android.
The advertising cabinet takes a link to the store, he “picks up” the logo, inserts the “Set” button, displays the number of ratings and the average rating from the store.

Here are the statistics of the advertising campaign:


For most of the time, March, the average cost of installation was 6.20 rubles / installation. The application has put every hundredth participant in an advertising campaign. In the first half of March, it was even possible to squeeze out 4 rubles per set, but then, apparently, the competition crowded out the ad, the views fell, it was necessary to raise the rate.

By the way, recommendation ! When testing an advertising campaign, don’t be implied by VC, the cabinet will offer too high rates for 1000 impressions. 80-100 rubles or more. With such rates, the budget will merge very quickly, and the price of the user will be high. By the method of scientific poking (it is a trial and error method, it is a complete exhaustive search method), we established the best price for ourselves 20p / 1000 impressions. Thus, the budget of 100 p. / Day "merged" in about 10-12 hours. Installations turned out inexpensive.

We unscrewed only one banner ad, so the scope for optimization was very high. As far as I know, with the right approach, they use a large number of banners with different designs, different texts and A / B testing methods bring conversion to a significantly higher level. I believe in our case it was possible to reduce the cost of the installation several more times.

The result of the standard advertising VK : 251 installation for 1591 rubles. (6.34 rubles / user)

Paid post on the wall of VK
Another 500 rubles. It was spent on a paid post in the group with something like “Cheerful student”, for about 50-60 thousand subscribers. The post was located at 4 o'clock in the evening. Payment by transfer to Yandex.Money. Result, approximately 20-30 reposts. Settings from this source unfortunately failed to trace. Since the application itself does not have any “killer features” and is unlikely to be greatly spread virally (repost), we have recognized this channel as unusable and have not been advertised any more.

VK free posts
We also selected about 40-50 VK groups of educational or student subjects and tried to place information about the application there. They wrote on the open walls themselves, on closed ones they contacted the administrators. As a result, managed to post about 10 messages. The result is unknown.
From the unexpected. Such posts received a good response in small, CIS-groups. And the groups themselves were small, and the administrators of the groups were aimed not at monetization, but for the benefit of the audience.

Advertising in your VK group (educational topics)
A post was posted and secured in its VK group for 6,000 subscribers. Installation is difficult to track, the post scored a certain number of likes and reposts. But not statistically significant.

Banner on your site (educational topics)
A banner on his led to the application store through the abbreviation goo.gl. This abbreviation provides certain statistics on transitions, which is much better than “blind” placement in VK groups.
Here are the statistics for all time:


I do not know why Google is so interesting draws the schedule since 2011. But the graph shows that the maximum clicks were in June, 1103 transitions. And 3308 transitions for all the time the banner. But! It is unlikely that all these transitions were ours.
What I mean can be seen from the following illustration:


1315 transitions for all time from the mobile platform Android.
Based on the conversion VK = 0.22 installation for 1 transition, we can estimate the banner's utility = 1315 * 0.22 = 291 installation.
Total banner, estimated : 291 installation for all time display.

I describe all these settings in such detail, their ridiculous number is 291 here, 250 there, not just like that. These starters are very important, why, you ask? Because then the internal promotion of the application in the market comes into play.

Internal Market Factors
If your application is useful, then the more people use it, the more good ratings, more installations, fewer failures, thanks to these factors, the application is ranked higher in the top, gets into higher search results by keywords.
I called this part of the promotion - the internal factors of the market.

It’s a lot of where it’s written, and I’ll write again, ensure high-quality content of the market when publishing an application. Make informative screenshots, make a clear description, give the application a talking title that accurately reflects the essence.

Of course, Google has a certain algorithm by which it ranks applications in the search results. We did not set up experiments as influenced by certain factors, attitudes, ratings, reviews, publisher activity. I can share subjective observations and one objective fact.

Subjective observations : Google appreciates the activity of the publisher, applications that are regularly updated and in which the publisher works with reviews are ranked above the "abandoned". After the start, the application jumps in the search results very much, gets to the first places, to the last, back and forth. When the position is “settled down” it will be more difficult to move it. The number of installations, if it plays a role, is not very large. With a small number of installations, you can take the first places.

Objective observation : and at the same time advice. In the name of the application, you can not cram all the words that you need to search. Therefore, think about how you can search for other than “cheat sheets” and “cheat sheets for students” and add the appropriate text to the description. At first, we had a general text in the description: what a wonderful application and what is useful in it. But after we added to the description a list of items for which there are cribs, the installation increased by 1.5 - 3 times! This is due to the fact that adding such words as "history", "law", "medicine", etc. we are in first place in the search for requests "crib history", etc. although previously did not appear in the search.

The results of the growth of positions in the market were fixed like this:


From this table it is clear that the application is confidently included in the top applications at the request of the "cheat sheet". I think in 2-3 months and at the main request of the "cheat sheet" we will take first place.

Concluding the story I want to say that I really wanted to fit the monetization, statistics and conclusions here, but the text is too bloated.
Therefore, I will leave a little more on the third article. From here, by the way, is the question, is it necessary to continue or not (poll added)?

Thank you for your attention, I ask for typos in PM, in the comments I will be in two hours.

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/357634/

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