Promoting a non-proprietary application on Google Play

Divers December 10, 2013 at 15:28

Promoting a non-proprietary application on Google Play

For the last 3 or even 4 months, I have long and hard written an IDE / code editor for web programmers for Android. It so happened that 2.5 years ago I already wrote a similar program together with a friend, and by some miracle it was quite successful, despite the fact that it was almost the first experience in creating anything other than university laboratory work.

After these years, having gained experience, I decided that I could write a program an order of magnitude better and more successful than our first attempt. Under the cutter there will be charts, information about earnings and any advice on promoting such applications.

What was done

It is immediately worth noting that the entire promotion budget at the moment is 5 thousand rubles, and, as many have already understood, this money went to the review on w3bsit3-dns.com.

W3bsit3-dns.com

Then a funny story happened: the girl who is negotiating with the developers on this topic at first refused my review, citing that the portal’s audience was inappropriate and that I would simply throw out the money, fortunately I managed to convince her. By the way, these investments paid off almost in the first 3 days. The review was written by anyone who is interested, you can read here .

Forums and social networks

Next went the forums mixed with social networks, or rather with one social network - Google+. There is nothing to say about forums, I’ll leave a list of links for convenience only:

But about G + is much more interesting. I took a photo like what is now in the title of the article, wrote a short sentence about the program and gave a link. After which, with this message, I ~~sucked ..~~ spammed all more or less relevant communities. And you know what? It gives an effect! The people, unlike our "programmer" forums, plyusovit and reposted - they liked. And here is a very important detail: the advantages that are put to the message with a link to the application go to Google Play! For example, my application currently has only 2000+ downloads, and in G + pluses there are as many as 524, 450 of which I typed in this way. And for those who are not in the know, these pluses now affect the issuance .

Ads using house ads via admob

The new admob interface is very strange. I set up home advertising for two days, until I read somewhere that to make it work, you need to do something like this:

Create a promotion company
Click on it in the table that appears.
Go to the “Ad units” tab
For each banner through the column “Mediation type” put down eCPM greater than that of AdMob Network and other networks.

Although in any case, there is practically no sense in this because of the very narrow audience of the application.

Blog Comments, Answers to Questions at StackExchange / StackOverFlow

Do not ignore this method of promotion, because if a person is looking for such a program, then why not make him and himself good.

Google Play Search

A separate item I want to mention the search. You won’t believe it, but the first 3 days by the exact name of the application was simply impossible to find . It was not part of the 500 (or so) apps Google Play found.

Now imagine the situation:
Vasya : I downloaded such a cool application here!
Petya : Which one?
Vasya : SUPER COOL APP
Petya : Not found.

Well, you get the point.

results

I use appannie.com to view ranks.

To get started, the big picture on Grossing:

As you can see, nothing impressive. You can see the impact of the review on w3bsit3-dns.com: Russia and Ukraine are quite high.

There is almost no growth.

Appannie does not display the position on the “Top New Free” tab, so I’ll just say that I checked it myself: in the Productivity category, the application ranks 6th in Russia, I don’t know in Ukraine, I hope that some of the readers will tell you ).

For downloads, as expected, nothing interesting is observed.

The peak on the charts is a review on w3bsit3-dns.com, which was on the second day after the release.

Well, the most interesting is money. The application contains in-app purchaise, which turned out to be not the best solution in terms of monetization. Firstly, judging by the comments in G +, people are afraid of this method of purchase because, according to them, it is buggy, and secondly, two positions in the search are better than one. I chose in-app purchase only because there is no need to control the consistency of as many as two descriptions in the store, plus you do not have to rebuild the application 2 times, after changing the name of the package.

In principle, I am satisfied and will continue to work. The only thing is annoying some reviews. The application is not for housewives, why install it, if it does not concern you at all? Here is an example of this (grammar saved):

Nothing is clear I can’t even create a project, it constantly gives errors and accordingly edit the files! I understand that you cannot create files yourself too ?? And why do you need to enter so much data when creating a project ?! I can’t understand anything! 1

Well and accordingly 1 asterisk. And the person has a profile on Linkin, in which he is a serious “Web Developer”. The truth is, for some reason, only Wordpress skills.

PS. If you write an application for geeks, then you can safely score on support for devices with OS earlier than ICS. For example, I have less than 3% of them.

Thanks for attention.

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Promoting a non-proprietary application on Google Play