Hey everyone,
I’ve started developing for android in 2008, throughout the last few years I finally got into iOS and I’ve been through all sorts of marketing techniques, trying to push my games and apps to the top.
I am not going to get too deep into history of what I tried and what doesn’t work, but basically, unless you are pulling out over $0.50 per download from your users in in-apps or ad value, all marketing techniques will fail you. Almost all of them. Banners, CPM campaigns, interstitials, video or incentivized networks, they will all give you negative ROI. Guaranteed!
To this day, Facebook is known to be #1 source of cheap installs on CPI basis. If you optimize your campaigns right, have tons of different ads and targeting segments, you might get away with $0.25 CPI in USA… (used to be about $0.10 two years ago) but as soon as you turn up your budget and try to get 1k or 2k downloads in a single day, you CPI rises closer to a dollar, and that is for a free game/app. This doesn’t really apply to small niches, so for those who want to argue how they get 10 installs per day for $5 and generate $10 in revenue back, I say… make an app that PEOPLE actually want, app that actually charts somewhere.
I am here to tell you that there are over 1 million apps, it almost doesn’t matter how unique yours is, they are all the same in the eyes of consumers! Your game is lost in the sea of free options. You need a massive push to get your app through the charts and in front of people! Thats the only way you can get a positive ROI.
How did Flappy Bird do it? How did Skippy Squirrel manage it? Fit the Fat? 4 tiles? stay in line? don’t touch the spikes? impossible rush? brain rush? And every single mini game out there that ranked out of nowhere, seemingly overnight?
After many failed launch attempts and tons of money spent “experimenting” I found exactly what works! I found exactly what those other guys did!
I ran a 4 day campaign on November for one of my games, Here are the results:
Total Cost: $3,800
Downloads : 48.5k
Result CPI: $0.08
80% or installs are in Tier1 country, with USA leading at 50%.
Interested in knowing more?
Read my blog post where I documented every step of the way with screenshot proof of everything.