Advertising with PPI

Monetizing, Advertising & Marketing Marketing Methods
1

What are the possibilities? I consider spending some little money on advertising. I guess the CPC is good for the app with extremely high quality of graphics and amazing “screenshots” that don’t even present the actual gameplay / app, but look amazing. So, I think for small developers its better to go with CPI. Also, its best to use many ad networks, because you need lower volume from each of them, and you could get the traffic cheaper that way.

Anyway, these are known incentivised CPI advertising networks:

  • Tapjoy - big company, lowest bid $0,10. Sounds good, but I’m afraid of bad reviews after using them. Anyone has some experience?
  • ayet-Studio - new company, lowest price $0,1 per download. By the way, at the moment it gives 50 free installs. It does not track if the user open
  • yeahmobi, lowest bid $0,05 according to @ramzixp
    And known non-incentivised CPI advertising networks:
  • Appbrain: lowest bid $0,20. Sounds like the best non-incentivised CPI network. Huge network, I guess you could get 10 - 50 downloads daily from tier 1 country for a very low bid, like $0,25 or $0,30- but I did not try that yet. I will try it with my first game and I’ll write how it was.
  • Appnext, lowest bid $0,3 worldwide ($0,5 usa)

I’ve seen a lot of ad networks, but most of them are full of marketing crap and I can’t find out if they do CPI and what is lowest bid / lowest deposit. Please tell me about your experience with CPI:

  • which ad networks have you used? what results?
  • what is the lowest bid?
  • what is the lowest deposit?
    I’ll update first post if you provide some valid informations.
2

Bump… There was a nice list on @ramzixp’s forum but he shut it down… Lesson for me: if you see important information posted by someone on forum, grab it, save to your disk ASAP, because he might delete it next minute.

3

either that or gain a lot of experience and save it all in your brain right? :slight_smile:

Just hold up on your campaign, I have a very serious marketing offer I will be posting about in the next few weeks here. It will beat any CPI price anywhere.

4

Almost every AD network has CPI campaigns but most of them are expensive. But also you have to look at how many downloads it takes to rank on the charts.

5

Still, I would like to know which networs provide CPI campaigns, and preferably their lowest bids. And if you used them, what was the retention, what user rates, is it incentivised or not… ramzixp stated that Appbrain is no good, and you need to bid very high to get any downloads. I heard that there are companies with the bid as low as $0,05. And I heard that Admob offers CPI but on unknown rules - after you spend some money with CPM / CPC, you might get this option (or not, it varies).

As to how many downloads it takes to rake on the charts… Well, as a general rule, more downloads = more visibility. I’m planning to promote my app when its ready by both free and paid methods. My budget is low, but I want to get as much as I can out of this cash.

6

I gave you information in the other thread. The only thing is if you have a small budget , don’t spend any on advertising. You need to get to the top 10 or 20 in the top new free category in order to see a good boost of organic installs. Otherwise you will be wasting your money. Also as far as retention goes, its up to your game or app not the incentive company. If its good users will use it and if its bad they will uninstall it.
The way to approach it would be

  1. Figure out the catergory you want to be in.

  2. Figure out the geo’s you want to target.

3)Figure out how many installs it takes to reach top of the top new free.

  1. Don’t pay anything more than 20 cents per user.

  2. Be patient because google takes a long time 2-3 days before you see your rank. Don’t get nervous keep spending the cash.

Right now thats all I can think of. The cheapest AD networks to promote your game is aye t studious and tapjoy. I wish I could find a cheaper alternative myself.

7

Well, I decided to ask one more time :slight_smile:
I know that non-incentivised CPI networks are:
AppBrain, lowest bid $0,2
Appnext, lowest bid $0,3 worldwide ($0,5 usa)

Incentivised app installs:
yeahmobi, lowest bid $0,05according to @ramzixp
Ayet-studio, lowest bid $0,1, they can deliver installs at that price but they don’t track app opens so the users might never open your app and give you no chance for conversion
Tapjoy, lowest bid $0,1 but probably need to bid quite a bit more to get any installs, even low volume

I’m mostly interested in more non-incentivised CPI ad networks that allow bids < $0,3.

And about not spending low budget on advertising… Well, I have a different opinion on this topic. If you don’t spend the money on advertising, its hard to get any downloads, for example see here: http://forums.makingmoneywithandroid.com/income-reports/20039-my-story-thus-far-3-apps-1-dollar-earned-what-should-i-do.html - sure, his games were not new Angry Birds, but seriously, sitting at 50 - 100 installs? Nowadays I really think you need to get some initial boost in downloads and ratings to get any decent amount of downloads and some visibility. And if you want to spread your game by the word of mouth, you need to get some users that will spread it right? So you need some real, engaged users. I’d like to buy at least 500 - 1000 downloads for a good start, not to get into top charts, just to get the game running, get some people talking about the game and boost the keyword ranking a bit. I don’t need to get the downloads ASAP, I can wait to get the good price per download.

There is also a different approach for getting downloads like @toxic’s instagram shoutouts, but its quite expensive for me (well, I live in a poor country) and there is no guarantee you’ll get any downloads. Also, I don’t know if my game and promo materials will be any good for his audience, I guess I’ll ask him what he thinks about it when I’m ready to launch the game. I guess he also wants his customers to be happy and to get good results, so he can get good reviews in exchange :slight_smile:

Anyway, if anyone knows more CPI networks and their lowest bids, please let me know. Especially if you know any non-incentivised CPI campaigns with lowest bid < $0,30. I’ll update first post.

8

I will be honest in my experience even though everyone in developer forum says hardcore or gamer games do better, they don’t in most cases. I made a casual game which most developer said was bad and I ended up making 4X the amount over 7 months. I made a platformer based on old gameboy games targeting nostalgic people, I got more downloads but didn’t even break even I lost money.
Casual type gamers click on ADs way more than hardcore or medium core gamers. Just a heads up to help you decide if your game is the type to invest in. If your making a medium to hardcore game , your going to have to spend more to rank really well to make money. Casual game you only have to rank high in the top new free #10-20 spot but medium or hardcore you need #1-#3 spot from my experience.

9

@allagainstyou:
I don’t really understand your logic. What can you actually achieve by buying 1000 downloads? How is this helping you to get more organic downloads? I don’t see any relation there. If your game is unappealing you will get low downloads. If your aso is bad you will get less downloads. If you now buy downloads you only disturb googles algorithm at start and make it more difficult to appear in similar apps lists to create a good first-30-day increasement.

10

His logic and other developers logic is if you reach the top of the top new free in your category then people will see your game and begin to download it more. I think that logic is sound if nobody knows about your games or apps existance, then how can they know to download it. Twitter and facebook posting will help but being on the top helps more. I did the same thing 2 times one time it worked well and the other it didnt.
I do know of only 1 developer here that has a talent that with ASO and picking the right title and theme he can get his apps to chart with no money down. I actually seen this developer do it consistantly chart with different apps because he has a knack for knowing what people are looking for but that skill is uncanny and most do not have it including me. I cant reveal his name and no he won’ttell you how he does it.
For the rest of us, its a struggle!!

11

Well, apparently I also have 2 apps with more than 500.000 downloads and some above 100.000 without spending a penny on advertising and achieved this from ASO alone. It’s not that difficult.

12

@StevePof by getting some downloads at the start, I can get:

  1. better feedback from users and from analysing flurry data
  2. better ranking on keywords, as it depends on downloads count too, I don’t think you can rank well on a keyword with 5 - 10 downloads a day, no matter how good your description is
  3. the game looks more appealing to users if it has some downloads, especially the game that wants “GET_ACCOUNTS” permission
  4. fill the rankings with some data
  5. get some interaction between players, they will see that they are being attacked and that the game is played by others
  6. if the game is good, these 1000 people will tell the others about the game. 1000 people will spread the word faster than, lets say, 100 people
  7. I’ll somehow estimate how well these player monetize, whats the retention rate, you can’t do that well with low number of users
    @Pixelpower
    This is not my logic, and you would know that if you read the topic. I explicitly stated that I don’t want to get into the top charts, as I don’t have the money for it.
13

I see your points somehow, but still don’t get really get it. We usually reach 1000 downloads in the first 3-4 days after release anyway. 1000 downloads is such a low number, really.

14

Yeah, it would be nice to know how to do that. I don’t. I did a small application and tried my ASO skills. For the first 3 - 4 days I did just a description that was good for a reader, but I couldn’t rank on any decent keyword. I started to change my description to more ASO-oriented, it improved my rankings a lot and I rank ~80 on random name generator, ~110 on Name Generator. I rank better for some less interesting keywords, but they probably have no traffic. Well, name generator is not an app to get millions of downloads and $$$, but I was hoping to get ~10 - 20 downloads daily, it would be a good start. But I’m far from that :slight_smile: I’m more happy with my game that I spent a year on than with a name generator written in 1 day, but I think ASO is the same and I don’t expect to get hundreds of daily downloads out of the blue. With a game ASO is even more difficult, with an app you know what keywords are you interested in, with a game - not so much.
Maybe it helps that you have a lot of games released already and people click “more from the developer”?

15

I agree with you. It’s definetly difficult to get downloads from a niche app and also difficult to do ASO for it. About the “more from developer” page I can say that we usually only get a small boost from it, but it’s still a bit helpful. For example if we release a new app and it reaches 10.000 downloads a day the downloads of our other apps only increase by 100-200 downloads a day.