We launch the application under 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:

• finance - what it cost us to develop and launch
• advancement - interesting points that we discovered

Before moving on to the article essentially, I will make a small digression.

Why am I writing all this? I am writing this because of practical information about monetization, promotion, and development on the Internet, “the cat cried.” Before diving into this project, I spent more than one hour searching for information that could help, answer questions: to do or not, what income can be expected, how much does it cost to develop an application? I can’t say that there is an informational vacuum, but there is very little practical experience, so, I share, I make up for it.
So…

Finance

I would conditionally divide the costs in our case into four parts:

1. Hired Development
2. Hired filling
3. Paid promotion
4. Own resources

Hired development : in total, the development of an application + a server part for creating content + a couple of updates with functional corrections according to the first reviews, cost us 20,000 rubles. According to my estimates, the workload of the programmer was 40-60 working hours. The programmer is a second-year student of our Krasnoyarsk university, worked in his spare time from study and session. Development, from start to launch, took about 2 months.

Hired filling: the start volume of materials for the launch (approximately 3,000 articles-cheat sheets) we and our partner did on our own, so this applies to our own resources, about them below. After the launch, taking into account the wishes and reviews 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 “finish” the base of materials to 6,000 articles-cheat sheets. It cost us 8,000 rubles, the completion time is about a month. The contractor is a familiar mommy on maternity leave, labor costs about 2-3 hours a day for filling.

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

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

• logo design, banners, promotional materials
• prototyping
• starting filling up to 3000 articles cheat sheets
• advertising in their VK group dedicated to education (approximately 6,000 participants)
• advertising banner on its website dedicated to education (approximately 2000-3000 visitors per day)
• search for suitable groups in VK for advertising posting and negotiations with administrators about placement

I find it difficult to accurately assess these resources in rubles. Considering the prices are higher 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.
Own resources:	10 000 rub.
Total:	40 000 rub.

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

Promotion

The following resources were used for promotion:

• Standard advertising VK
• Paid post in VK group
• Contractual free posts in VK groups
• Advertising in his VK group (educational topics)
• Banner on your website (educational topics)
• Internal factors of the market

VK standard advertising
In my opinion, Vkontakte provides a very good platform for advertising mobile applications.
Advantages - wide audience reach, high opportunities for social and geographical targeting, flexible setting of budgets and advertising prices, statistics not only on clicks, but also on settings.
Cons - not always adequate moderation. Here I mean that the same ad can be rejected for various reasons or be accepted without comment, it depends, as I understand it, on the moderator, his competence and mood.

The ad that we advertised looked like this:


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

Here are the statistics of the advertising campaign:


For the main time, March, the average cost of installation was 6.20 rubles / installation. The application was delivered by every hundredth participant in an advertising campaign. In the first half of March, they even managed to squeeze 4 rubles / installation, but then, apparently, competition supplanted the announcement, views fell, and the rate had to be raised.

By the way, the recommendation! When testing an advertising campaign, don’t follow the VK, the cabinet will offer too high bids for 1000 impressions. 80-100 rubles or more. At these rates, the budget will merge very quickly, and the user’s price will be high. By the method of scientific poking (he is the method of trial and error, he is the method of exhaustive search), we have set the optimal price for ourselves to be 20 r / 1000 impressions. Thus, the budget of 100 rubles / day "merged" in about 10-12 hours. Installations were inexpensive.

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

The result of standard VK advertising : 251 installations for 1,591 rubles. (6.34 rubles / user)

Paid post on the VK wall
Another 500 rubles. it was spent on a paid post in the group something like "Funny Student", for about 50-60 thousand subscribers. The post was placed for 4 hours in the evening. Payment by transfer to Yandex.Money. The result, about 20-30 reposts. Unfortunately, it was not possible to trace the installation from this source. Since the application itself does not have any “killer features” and is unlikely to be very spread by the virus (reposts), we recognized this channel as unusable and were not advertised anymore.

Free VK posts
. We also selected about 40-50 VK groups of educational or student topics and tried to post information about the application there. On the open walls they wrote themselves, on the closed ones, they contacted the administrators. As a result, it was possible to post about 10 posts. The outcome is unknown.
From the unexpected. Such posts received a good response in small, CIS groups. And the groups themselves were small, and the group administrators were aimed not at monetization, but at the benefit of the audience.

Advertising in his VK group (educational topics)
A post was placed and fixed in his VK group for 6,000 subscribers. It’s difficult to track the settings, the post scored a certain number of likes and reposts. But not statistically significant.

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


I don’t know why Google has been drawing graphs so interesting since 2011. But the graph shows that the maximum clicks was in June, 1103 transitions. And 3308 clicks for the entire duration of the banner display. But! It is unlikely that all these transitions were ours.
What I mean is seen from the following illustration:


1315 transitions for all time from the Android mobile platform.
Based on the conversion of VK = 0.22 installations per transition, we can evaluate the utility of the banner = 1315 * 0.22 = 291 settings.
The result of the banner, estimated : 291 installations for the entire time of the show.

I describe all these settings in such detail, their ridiculous amount is 291 here, 250 there, for a reason. These start-ups are very important, why, you ask? Because then the internal promotion of the application in the market comes into play.

Internal factors of the market
If your application is useful, 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 and gets higher search results for keywords.
I called this part of the promotion - internal market factors.

Much has been written where, and I will write again, ensure high-quality filling of the market when publishing the application. Take informative screenshots, make an understandable description, give the application a telling name that accurately reflects the essence.

Of course, Google has a certain algorithm by which it ranks applications in search results. We did not experiment how these or other factors, attitudes, ratings, reviews, publisher activity influence. I can share subjective observations and one objective fact.

Subjective observations : Google appreciates the publisher’s activity, applications that are regularly updated and in which the publisher works with reviews are ranked higher than “abandoned”. After the start, the application jumps very strongly in the search results, gets to the first places, to the last, back and forth. When the position "settles down" to move it will be more difficult. The number of installations, if it plays a role, is not very large. With a small number of installations, you can take 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 else besides the “cheat sheet” and “cheat sheet for students” they can search for you and enter the appropriate text in the description. First, we had a simple text in the description: what a wonderful application and what is useful in it. But after we entered the description of the list of items for which there are cheat sheets, the installation increased by 1.5 - 3 times! This is due to the fact that adding words such as “history”, “law”, “medicine”, etc. we came to first place in the search for “crib history” requests, etc. although previously did not appear in the search at all.

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


From this table it can be seen that the application is confidently included in the top applications at the request of "cheat sheets". 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 here also monetization, statistics and conclusions, but the text turns out to be too bloated.
Therefore, I will leave a little more for the third article. Hence, by the way, the question is, do you need 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.