What interesting things have I learned in two years of developing and promoting a mobile game

Hello, Habr! Long time no see ... Since the last publication - "What did I learn from my mistakes and how to do better the second game," it's been 2 years! Today I’ll talk about what I’ve tried new in promoting, monetizing the application and of course what came of it.



1. Introduction


At the time of last publication, I had a small toy “Space Monsters” in my piggy bank. As they say - "The first pancake is lumpy." Only 6,000 installations for all years.

Released at that time, “Quick Brain” (September 22, 2014). until November 18, 2014 it showed a good start and reached 5,000 installations. The main stream came from unidentified sources, which took more than six months to change the balance of power in favor of Google play.

What now :


Installations - 350,000
Active - 98,000
August 2016 - 88,500 active users. Income of 200 € for August with adMob, adColony, applovin and in-game purchases.

Below I will describe the steps that I took to maintain the light in the project, how I did not let it go out and that helped to bring it to the tops (for viewing positions I use appannie.com).

2. Promotion


2.1 Free


I asked everyone who can only install the application and of course evaluate. (Works well for the market, along the way you get an oral review about the application). I found a large list of forums and posted to everyone in a row, as much as possible. (It worked fine, but not all forums are worth the time)

As a result, the following list of free favorites remained:

  • W3bsit3-dns.com - views of the forum article - 14,200)
  • forum.xda-developers - 11,000 article views on the forum.
  • trashbox.ru - From here I got a huge influx of users. From the representative of the forum, who unsubscribed in a comment on November 8, 2014, there were already more than 2000 downloads!

Since publication, a forum post has been lost in history. The solution is simple, for w3bsit3-dns.com and xda - a new version came out, something was updated, or just wanted to raise the top, write a comment on your article and it immediately rises. Conduct conversations with commentators, each message also updates the post. Trashbox is the same story, only here it’s enough to simply edit the post and it’s in the top again (they even sent me a warning for this).

Reviewsmotion.com. You evaluate, evaluate you - everything is simple here, the daily limit of 10 ratings. It worked well until it began to notice that Google removes comments on Google play, which it considers not real, and then turned off the bench, but after that the site changed the rules for users so that they would evaluate and not delete immediately.

2.2 Paid


Paid promotion - I turned to him only a year later. The growth of the active base was stable, slow, no extravaganza. And I got bored, I wanted explosive growth.

November 2015 time to look for paid ways to promote! The option to buy paid traffic did not work, I bought a few users, the price is high, and the worst is that they are motivated and are not, in principle, your active users.

Perhaps one of the readers has a positive experience buying traffic, it would be interesting to know your opinion.

Vkontakte - for me it turned out to be the best option, cheap, easy to use.
For all the time, during the year, I spent only $ 1139 on Vkontakte - I received 37,000 installations. An average of $ 0.03 per user. The most important thing: to choose your target audience, to draw an attractive image. I used both mobile app targeting and advertising in communities (here it’s better for each group to have a post that is most suitable for the topic, then there will be a good profit). Of course, it all depends on the application. “Quick Brain” was 2-3 times cheaper than the “Russian language” application (It’s worth considering that it advertised outside the current season and the advertising image failed).

Pros: cost, large audience, not expensive, ease of use
Minus: Audience from the CIS, difficulties with updating posts, editing.

I did not advertise constantly, with interruptions, invested per day in the range of $ 10-15 a maximum. This was enough to rise in the top to some positions. However, I did not risk spending more to get to the very tops, as this whole thing did not pay off. Due to such advertising campaigns, it was possible to increase by 2-3 times the daily active audience, which continued to persist. It was possible to reach the first positions of the top categories for some countries. For example, Belarus and Latvia did not bring such a significant increase as Russia itself. But getting to the tops in small countries is very simple, just a couple of hundred installations a day is enough.

Maybe you had experience in advertising, maybe it’s worth spending large sums at a time to get to the top positions of the market as much as possible?

Examples of effective advertising posts:



Tell me which of these advertising posts do you like more?

In fact, it all depends on who you show it to. I conducted an experiment, turned them on at one time, they differed only in image and target audience. It turned out that the first option works fine for girls from 13 to 16 from CIS countries with an interest in games. CTR came out 4 - 5.5% every third clicked installed. The same images for a male audience worked many times worse.

The second option was effective for a mixed audience under the age of 17 years. CTR on average 4.5% in the CIS. Again a good result.

Conclusion:Target your ad to your target audience, it can also be tested by advertising the same ad but for different ages, interests, countries, etc. So you will find the most effective audience and will not spend extra money on attracting. Do not be too lazy to do so. Unfortunately, the approval of one post on Vkontakte may take a day, there are also difficulties updating the announcement. Changed the name for the Russian audience of the market - everything, consider not editing the advertising post. Change the text - wait for approval for half a day. Age, country, gender, interests, the benefit can be changed instantly. The rating of the application is also not updated, you need to create a new ad.

Facebook / Instagram
Advertising is more expensive at times. Having spent $ 300 received 1,500 users - $ 0.2 per user. Targeted the USA and Europe. Most came from Europe. The result was very positive, due to this audience, I appeared in the tops of European countries and still remain in them. The United States proved to be an extremely expensive market and difficult to master.

I used Instagram more. It is very interesting that you can interact with an advertising post, like, leave comments, and the more response from the audience, the cheaper it is to get a user.



I racked my brains for a very long time, what kind of comments. "10, 10, 10, etc.". But it turned out - this is an example of good user interaction with the image and its involvement in the advertising process.

Can someone share stories of how you conquered the western world?

3. Monetization


Everything is standard here.

  • AdMob - banners and full-screen ads.
  • Purchase - disable advertising for denyuzhku
  • Video advertisement
  • Buying coins

AdMob generates most of the revenue. For the best month there was an average of 6 € per day. In the corresponding month, there were 40 outages.

Coin purchases - 0 ! (Here I either set the balance incorrectly, I give a lot of coins and everyone has enough, or is it a bad monetization model for this type of application) - Dear Habré users, what do you think about this?

To be more flexible, I decided to customize the display of the frequency of advertising.

Each advertisement has its own ID, in adMob I study which ones bring the most money, which ones they click on, study the reviews about the application and configure this setting flexibly. Because Advertising settings affect ad frequency, revenue, and app rating. Do not just find a middle ground between the indicators.

Setting up advertising. Json
{
  "ad_rules": {
    "banner": {
      "home_frequeancy": 4,
      "levels_frequeancy": 1,
      "multiplication_table_frequeancy": 2,
      "training_start_frequeancy": 2,
      "quick_math_gameplay_frequeancy": 2,
      "true_false_gameplay_frequeancy": 3,
      "training_gameplay_frequeancy": 3,
      "game_over_frequeancy": 2
    },
    "fullscreen": {
      "home_frequeancy": 50,
      "levels_frequeancy": 5,
      "multiplication_table_frequeancy": 4,
      "training_start_frequeancy": 4,
      "quick_math_gameplay_frequeancy": 0,
      "true_false_gameplay_frequeancy": 0,
      "training_gameplay_frequeancy": 0,
      "game_over_frequeancy": 5
    }
  }
}


4. We increase indicators


4.1 Rating


Application rating is an important indicator for users and affects the location in the top of the store.

Therefore, it was decided to show a custom dialogue. In it, if the user estimates 4-5 stars, we immediately send to Google play. Otherwise, we give the opportunity to enter a comment, which we send by mail. From here we immediately cut off negative ratings. Often, after all, I had to see one star with the comment “Good! (Photo under the spoiler). "

I show it every 20 starts of a page with levels, and there is also a button to evaluate on almost every page.

Evaluation Dialog


Post Grades


An important point - respond to comments on your application, it often turns out to change the user's rating for the better for you.

4.2 Returns to the application


First of all, I implemented daily reminders that remind me at the same time that I should practice, with the ability to turn off or change the notification time. For August, only from this notification the application was opened 17,800 times, which is 20% of all users in a month. This has increased almost all the positions in the tops and with the help of this the tops have become much easier to hold, without much advertising costs.

Firebase Notifications:As it turned out, the tool is not very flexible and with bugs, but useful. If you do not often, but periodically indulge in sending pushes to users, you can return many to the application. The most important thing here is not to overdo it, people don’t really like constant notifications, especially those that are not disabled in the application settings (unfortunately, I still haven’t made it possible to disable notifications for Firebase) - Maybe someone did this and knows how to register correctly and beautifully from the push? (without using topics)

Small life hack:
Often a situation arises in Google play when your “Designed for phones” application and a notification in the console constantly remind you that your application is not optimized for tablets! And no matter how you download apk, it doesn’t disappear, but it loses traffic not being in the tops on tablets ...

Solution: If your application actually displays correctly for tablets and meets certain rules , feel free to write here in a special form .

Conclusion


Perhaps I’m doing the wrong thing, trying to optimize an application that does not bring enough to recoup the investment in it. But this is already like a brainchild that is difficult to let go and forget. Each time it’s nice to see positive reviews that remind you of why you are doing all this and for whom. And finding loopholes and optimizing all sorts of little things, doing better and better is a pleasure. “With great power - great responsibility comes”, there is a fear of error in front of a large audience, each oversight is more and more expensive each time, especially with the growth of the audience. (Thanks to Google for beta testing, for phased implementation)

I promised shortly, so I will divide the post into several parts.

Next time I’ll talk about how the translations of the application into different languages ​​and screenshots have affected. What tests did I play on Google play, a notification about the new version when the application started, about how I analyzed user interaction and what I did with it. I’ll tell you about the video for google play, what came of it, how I changed the category for the application. If I didn’t cover enough of any of the topics above, I can dwell on them in detail.

Thanks for attention!

Regards,
Alexander.

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