First week of an app

Hello

I published several games last months and what i noticed is, that if the game after the first week don’t has many downloads it has no or only little chances to enter the top new charts.

last friday i published a new game and today after 7 days it was downloaded only ~700 times. but the uninstall rate was not bad (50% overall and in germany only 40% (160 downloads/60 uninstalls) ) - germany is also the country where i reached yesterday the ~300th place in a game category, but the game is still not in the top new free category)

Now I’m thinking i will re publish this app after a while, write some additional keywords for germany and compare the first weeks. i did this already one time and the same game was doing much better than its forerunner…

what is your experience to enter the top new charts? is it still realistic to hit 100000 installs in the next 30 days after this weak first week or should i republish it already tomorrow? I am unsure, because i think its a good game… if more people download it i get more 5star reviews and low uninstall rates at least in germany, but i think its already to late to reach 5000+ downloads a day next weeks.

Well yesterday I saw a featured app with 10k-50k users within 2 months, maybe you can pay for it like google’s better search results.

You could make your app again under a differrent package name with some other functions and lead your “old” users to that with e.g. a popup that advertises the new version.

This is, what I will do with one of my apps. Maybe google notices the trick and blocks your possibilty to reach featured but you can have luck as well

I am german and I can tell you, that the most important “ad-clicker-group” are the 14 y/o kids which can’t speak english that good (our education possibilities are really great, but our education itself is totally shitty). You should translate app + app description into german

The best way of getting into the charts is to put some money behind the game with some ad promotion like AppFlood or AppBrain. If you can push a ton of downloads to it you will rise in the rankings quickly. If the game is good then you have a chance of maintaining the download rate through organic growth (since you are up in the charts a bit, way more people will see it etc). Also you can push up through the Trending lists too, which provide even more exposure.

Of course there is no guaranteed results from doing this. The game might not be up to the challenge or for whatever reason it might just not pull through. The best way of ensuring that works is to throw enough money at it, still with risk of course.

If you have a solid game, then this approach can literally make you golden.

I have a game in the works right now that I have big hopes for. I’m planning to throw at least $300 at it in the first few days if I think it’s good enough.

It won’t hurt to pursue review sites and Social media too, preferably all in a very small window so it all produces downloads in a small space of time. That’s the key thing here.

I released an app last year and got it reviewed by 5 sites, got some Facebook pages to promote it and managed to land 1.5k downloads on it’s 2nd day. It got into the Trending list and peaked at 7.5k downloads a day. Sadly it dropped off big time after a few weeks and now runs at about 600 downloads a day. It just wasn’t up to the task.

Here’s some proof:

Did you manage to get all the costs through advertisment incomes back?

In this case, I only spent about $50, which paid for itself more then tenfold. Most of the channels I used in that case were free, or in exchange for something on my end.

I have yet to spend any large amounts as I have not needed to since I’ve been targeting niches.

I should be releasing the game I mentioned in a month or so, which I will post about if it works out.

$50 please tell me which services you used, they seem pretty effective :o

Off topic: I studied in Germany, UK and Chile (my home country). Based on my experience, German students are many steps above UK students and a COUPLE STAIRS above Chileans hehe. Man, there was a german classmate in my Master in UK, he was a learning machine!

That was just the total cost for getting some basic reviews on some Android review sites.
The trick is to get the ball rolling. All the push was done in the first few days. The downloads just rolled in afterwards.

If you have a broad market then those sites can make a big difference.

rly? Everything I hear from others is, that germans just are not able to learn proper english, even they say, the way I speak is very good ^^

Can you please tell them anyway?

Honeslty can’t remember which ones in specific I used that time,
but here is a list of them someone gave me with contact details etc
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AgFOHSGtWeVxdEVHa3NVbWViVTRtMTJwcEVSZ2FhREE&hl=en_GB#gid=0

That’s an awesome spreadsheet! Thanks for sharing!

very nice sharing the great spreadsheet, very helpful!
And i agree with A1ka1inE, you need to give your game a push at the first few days, I bought 1000 non targeted players with bid price of $0.02 on appflood.
And it was helpful for a better rank. and yeah, if your game is a solid one, it’s worthwhile.
Also we have our page on facebook, twitter
Also some player forums are also a good place to make more people know your game:)
and there are some other android app stores besides google play, just put your game on them to get more installs.
some of them like Getjar:
Getjar App Commerce
AppBrain:
Top Android Apps and Games in the Android Market | AppBrain.com
Verizon:
https://developersso.verizon.com/auth/login
Mobango:
Download Free Games, Videos, Movies & Apps | Mobango.com
Handster:
http://www.handster.com/administrator/
Androidpit
Android Developer - PapayaMobile - AndroidPIT
Playandroid:
http://www.playandroid.com/android-developers
Samsung:
Samsung Apps: Seller Office

Oh, btw, don’t forget to put a video on google play. It does work according to our experience.
Good luck!

very nice sharing the great spreadsheet, very helpful!
And i agree with A1ka1inE, you need to give your game a push at the first few days, I bought 1000 non targeted players with bid price of $0.02 on appflood.
And it was helpful for a better rank. and yeah, if your game is a solid one, it’s worthwhile.
Also we have our page on facebook, twitter
Also some player forums are also a good place to make more people know your game:)
and there are some other android app stores besides google play, just put your game on them to get more installs.
some of them like Getjar:
Getjar App Commerce
AppBrain:
Top Android Apps and Games in the Android Market | AppBrain.com
Verizon:
https://developersso.verizon.com/auth/login
Mobango:
Download Free Games, Videos, Movies & Apps | Mobango.com
Handster:
http://www.handster.com/administrator/
Androidpit
Android Developer - PapayaMobile - AndroidPIT
Playandroid:
http://www.playandroid.com/android-developers
Samsung:
Samsung Apps: Seller Office

Oh, btw, don’t forget to put a video on google play. It does work according to our experience.
Good luck!

If you submit your app to AndroidB - Thorough reviews for Android apps which is now AndroidB - Thorough reviews for Android apps, the administrator Claude, not only gives an exceptionally well-written description of your app, but gives you a similar list of sites in Google docs where you can submit your apps. I haven’t compared the two, so there might be a lot of overlap.

I was not as lucky as A1ka1inE… I spent a lot of time on two projects that never had the benefit of that push.
My experience is completely opposite.
I experienced that spending money on AdMob to “buy” users through ad is really expensive.
Suppose that your ad gets 3% of clicks and goes to 0.5% of installs. If an ad clicked costs to you 5 cents this means that every new user costs 30cents. With 50$ you get 166 users. To get a boost you should be able to get at least 2000/5000 users in 2/3 days, that is at least 20 times more, so you should spend with this calculation (maybe wrong) about 1000$.

I also tried inhouse advertising: this costs definitely less, because what I spend is what I lose in money, that is obviously much less than what an ad network earns! Anyway it was not useful because my users are not enough.
And this does not guarantee that after the boost the users will go on… big companies can afford advertising because they have a very large group of users that migrate from one app to another and bring money also via IAP. I know that they invest much more on advertising than on developing, but they have numbers large enough to afford it.

I strongly suppose that the success of that app was driven by reviews, not by ads…

I think A1ka1ine said he paid for campaigns on pay-per-install networks like app brain and appflood. With those you can get installs for as little as 0.20 per install, unencentivcised installs. I’ve tried ad-mob before and it was a waste of money. Had much better results with appbrain.