How to promote a free-to-play game on the Russian market for $ 5 thousand?

The WakeApp company, based on our Friday publication “What to do if there is only $ 5 thousand for marketing?“, told us what and how to spend the marketing budget if you work in Russia.

When developing an advertising campaign, it is important to understand the difference between the promotion of services or similar applications with games. In this case, we are considering the promotion of a free-to-play game with a budget of $5000-6000.

It is worth choosing several main ways of promotion and focusing on them:

• Reviews on thematic sites;
• attracting traffic using myTarget;
• advertising on social networks;
• keyword promotion;
• promotion to the top App Store categories.

Reviews among thematic publications

This type of promotion can often give a good amount of organic traffic with a total budget of about $1000-$1500. On average, taking into account all posted reviews, developers can attract 3,000 unmotivated users in a short time while simultaneously posting on such sites. Among the top sites can be identified AppleInsider, “Planet iPhone”, iGuides, iPhones.

When publishing, be sure to familiarize yourself with the style of the publication, which can be radically different from most others, and listen to the advice of editors on placement — they are often interested in attracting a large amount of traffic no less than developers.

Advertising in myTarget

Before starting an advertising campaign, you need to make 5-10 creative banners and test them on a small budget. After weeding out non-working creatives, choose the options with the highest conversion and invest a budget in the region of $2000 in their promotion, as well as carefully target only the target audience.

“myTarget already accounts for more than 50% of all mobile traffic. This source is one of the most attractive and with the right creatives, you can attract installations at a cost of 15-25 rubles. The main thing is not to stop working on improving advertisements. Old advertising campaigns tend to “burn out” and even a small change in creativity can give a new increase in traffic,” said the CEO of WakeApp Eduard Lebedev.

This will allow you to get about 1,500 users, whose retention rate may be quite high.

Advertising on social networks

Placing advertising posts in large communities can be an excellent source of traffic. We need to make a selection of the most popular

In order to reduce the cost of an advertising campaign in this case, it is better to negotiate directly with the owners of public sites. Due to this, placing advertising reviews in popular groups can attract a lot of traffic at an attractive price. In the case of advertising the game in social networks, it is important to think over the creative for placement in each of them. The advertising post should correspond as much as possible to the topic of the public, so carefully study the feed before creating a creative.

The disadvantages of this point, as well as reviews on websites, should be attributed to a quick “burnout” — it can work no more than a few times, after which it will become more difficult to get traffic from the public.

With a budget of $1,000, public posting can provide about 2,500 users if the game “flies” into the audience.

Keyword Promotion

One of the additional methods may be keyword promotion. For example, if you promote the game on the request of “racing”, you can achieve an increase of about 3,500 or more users throughout the entire lifetime of the application in the App Store.

It is advisable to spend about $800 on this type of promotion and subsequently it will be able to provide a stable increase in organic users from the App Store.

Promotion to the top App Store categories

This method should be combined with others, which will reduce the need to use motivated traffic. It is important to choose the right promotion day, in which competition in the category will be minimal and will allow you to maximize the return from the top of the App Store. At WakeApp, we use our own technology, which allows us to determine how many installations are needed at any time to get to the top, due to this, it turns out to choose the most profitable day for promotion.

In addition, we must not forget about the mandatory retention in the first positions for several days — in this case, the increase in organic users should fully pay for the promotion. It is important to use this method after launching advertising campaigns

In total, with a budget of $800, you can get about 4,000 users in a few days, 50% of which will be motivated.

Key factors for success and audience retention

The key role is played not only by the right advertising campaign, but also by the overall optimization of the application. Therefore, before starting the promotion, it is necessary to pay attention to the following factors:

• Properly configure analytics and funnels to track bottlenecks and monitor traffic quality. This will allow you to cut off low-quality traffic from all sources and find traffic with the highest rates of retention and passing events in the application.
• Minimize the weight of the application — the smaller the weight, the easier it is for users to download the application without using Wi-Fi. And this often plays an important role in deciding whether to download an application.
• Use a 15-second video clip of the game as a preview in the App Store. Due to this, you will demonstrate the gameplay and be able to interest users.
• Pay attention to testing icons and the first couple of screenshots. To do this, it is better to use services such as splitforce.com , splitmetrics.com and optimizely.com .
• To pay attention to ASO applications, this will allow you to achieve high positions in the top of the App Store with minimal addition of organic or motivated traffic. In addition, the correct ASO allows you to get a stable increase in organic traffic.

Equally important is the work with the acquired users. To do this, you can use daily Push messages in order to interest users in returning again. Bonuses to active players who open the game daily also have an excellent effect on the retention rates after promotion.

For example, you can integrate roulette with additional prizes, which you can receive a limited number of times daily, and the reward increase system operates on a cumulative basis — every day you enter the application, the chance to receive a valuable reward increases. A similar reward system was successfully used by developers from Rovio in Angry Birds Epic.

You can try to increase the activity of your users in social networks due to the built—in sharing of results – this method encourages rivalry between players and their friends.