8 life hacks to promote apps to the top
The founder of the platform for bringing applications to the top of WakeApp, Eduard Lebedev, told App2Top about ways to promote applications to the top.
There are many tools for promoting applications on the market — each of them has its pros and cons. In two years of work, we have promoted many applications to the tops and conducted many experiments. Therefore, we decided to analyze our past campaigns and share tips that will allow application developers to save significantly on bringing their products to the top.
- Top — not for everyone
Only mass, viral and simple application mechanics make sense to bring to the top. Remember this!
Such applications include dating services, music, non-hardcore games, online ordering of books, clothes, food and much more.
- Polish the app before promoting
Polished applications get the best result. It is important to conduct A/B testing of icons, screenshots and descriptions. We use the Splitmetrics service for this.
Also, you should take up promotion only after debugging applications, achieving high LTV and other metrics at the soft launch stage.
It is also important to take into account the weight of the application — the smaller the better. Restrictions on downloading large applications only over Wi-Fi seriously affect the influx of organic matter.
- Buy a place in the top without guarantees
When a guarantee is included in the contract for a specific position in the top of the App Store, an error is included in the price, which allows you to connect an additional amount of traffic under unfavorable circumstances. The probability of the contractor using this additional traffic is very low, but it still exists and greatly affects the cost of promotion. Therefore, a guaranteed top-10 is more expensive than buying 15,000 installations, since sometimes they may not be enough for withdrawal. Plus, the App Store algorithm may fail: as a result, even more installations will be needed. But in other cases, 13,500 downloads may be enough for the top 10.
But, I repeat, for the guarantee of getting into the top ten – and you have to overpay.
It is optimal to buy traffic by CPI, calculating the approximate number of necessary installations and taking all the risks on yourself. If there is a shortage, you can buy more installations right during the advertising campaign — now the motive is bought on the market for only 15-40 rubles per installation.
- Pour traffic for at least 2 days
Do not make a conclusion in the top goal — payback and user engagement are more important. Many people forget about it, make a short boost, after which the application crashes from the top. It basically doesn’t pay off.
From experience, I can say that it is important to keep the application in the top for at least 2 days, only then it brings effect. If the application flies into the audience, and this happens often, then a little motivated or unmotivated traffic is needed to maintain the position. The rest will be done by organic installations from the top, like a snowball sticking in 2 days.
- Follow the path of least resistance
You need to promote gaming applications only on the day when there is the least competition in the top category of games. There are systems that allow you to find out on which days there is the least competition in the top categories.
So when using the same amount of traffic in one day, you can take the top 10 games, and if you wait for time, then get into the Top 2 games. Accordingly, more organics come from the Top 2 games than from the top 10.
- Aim for the top 1/4 and use the traffic mix
You can fly into the Top 25 and not feel the increase in traffic. Empirically, using the example of many clients, I can say that the best effect is felt only when advancing to the first four positions of the top. In this case, the boost turns out to be more effective — the amount of organic matter obtained helps to stay in the first places even after the end of the advertising campaign.
An excellent life hack is the use of a bunch of motivated and unmotivated traffic — this mix makes promotion the most effective. It is enough to bring the application to the Top 20 with unmotivated traffic, and then connect a motivated one. This will allow you to soar into the Top 1-5. At the same time, you will spend less money on acquiring target users at the expense of organics from the top. This method is especially good after the release of new games and services — you can quickly recruit new users.
If it works, then we do the Top-1, but the Top-4 also gives an excellent result. In general, up to 30% more organic matter comes from the Top 1 than from the Top 4.
- Watch out for fraud
If you promote to the top, then your application will be installed by people who receive money for downloading applications. It so happened that the services where they pay money for installations, everyone wants to hack and cheat.
The easiest way to cheat is by resetting the phone and tricking the tracking system. This is when people from the same device install the same application several times. This does not affect the position in the top, but the tracking system records this as a new installation. In order not to pay for traffic that does not benefit, after the campaign you need to prepare a fraud report and send it to the partners from whom you purchased traffic.
How to make a fraud report correctly?
Everything is simple. Downloading the report from the tracking system. First of all, we look at IP addresses. If more than 3 installations have been made from one IP, then you should carefully look at these installations (date, time, device name, OS version, device localization). A certain conclusion can be drawn from these data.
Next, we clean all installations where the IP is repeated many times, and also look at duplicate addresses in which only the last value changes.
But you should not focus only on the IP address. Look at the duplicate device names, if, for example, you have 100 installations from devices named iPhone (JohnRichardson) — this suggests that these installations are most likely made from one device.
The probability that 100 people who made installations for you named their device that way is extremely small. Also look at the telecom operator. If this is, for example, T-Mobile or Verizone, and the country, for example, Russia, where these operators do not work, then this is definitely a fraud. For a more in-depth analysis, you can check IP addresses for belonging to some service that rents servers. A normal user will have an IP provider, but not a server somewhere on Amazon.
- Use only direct traffic sources
The market for motivated traffic is small. The owners of the main sources know each other by sight. But developers often buy traffic from mobile agencies or networks whose total cost of promotion is higher. Among the direct traffic sources in Russia, TapJoy, WakeApp, Aarki, Supersonic and Fyber should be singled out. Traffic from such companies is significantly cheaper due to the lack of margins, which are included in the cost of resellers.
Another advantage of working with direct traffic sources is that they always know how many installations they can do in 1 day. When you are planning a large campaign, you can negotiate with the sources for a guaranteed amount of traffic that they will make to you, and if they do not fulfill the required amount, then you can set a fine, for example, of 10%. This is a great motivation to unscrew the volumes on time and not sell the volume that you cannot fulfill.
So the conclusion is simple — buy traffic only from direct suppliers. Avoid resellers.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I want to say once again that getting to the top is just one of the tools for promoting applications and it is not suitable for everyone, but if you know the life hacks for getting to the top of the App Store and Google Play, then you can make a really high—quality campaign for a very small budget.
