Cheapest way to get downloads/ratings?

there are many apps with similar content to mine, but much lower quality. because they have been there for much longer, mine don’t even show up when you search for it.

what is the cheapest way to promote my app and drive downloads? just enough so that it shows up on searches in google play compared to other apps. i only want around 2000-5000 downloads or 100 ratings (whichever comes first) .

so far appbrain looks to be the cheapest, any other suggestions?

I’m pretty sure appbrain is the cheapest… you can bid $0.2/install

well i spent 150$ on appbrain, i got 750 installs and 2 ratings one 5 star and one 1 star from an arabic country with the review “you should downsize” … seems like a waste.

at least you spiked your downloads up to get on top new charts right?

On average you should get 1 review per 500 downloads

#520 in Philippines was the only upside for the 150$. not sure if this is good or bad lol.

damn… That’s no good unless your app is for that audience lol

Not to be critical, but you only spent $150. If you could get into the top new charts for $150 everyone would do it. You said yourself at the first post, you wanted 2000 to 5000 downloads. At $.20 per download you would have to spend at least $400. I don’t know if this would get you in the top charts or not. My last app I spent $1000 with appbrain when it released and made it to position #150 in top new free for it’s category. This got me over 40k installs for the first 30 days it was in the new charts. Spending $100 here and $100 there will not make your money back, you’ve got to spend enough while it’s in the first 30 days to get you listed, then the installs from being listed will make the investment really worth it.

@XdebugX So after your investment of $1000 to get it to top new free last after the 30 days? Did it make a difference short / medium / long term to your rankings and downloads?

I was getting about 1500 downloads a day by the end of being listed in the top new free for category. But after 30 days, I’m not in any of the lists anymore. I do have a high rank in search for my “keyword” but now I only get about 300 downloads per day. Maybe if your app is naturally appealing enough and gets very high in the top new free lists you might could rank in the top lists after 30 days. Hard to say if you could buy your way that high, I think the app would have to be naturally something people are looking for as well.

May i ask what country was? and how much did you pay per install? thank you!

When i invested about $2000 campaign on AppBrain i got similiar results ranked very good on Top New Free for a particular country, i just target this country (big one) because i thought it was better then targetting severall smaller countries, now i think if i targeted smaller countries it would have ran better. Also i started from day one advertising the app agressively getting about 1500 to 2000 installs a day and in final day pushed to 3000. That was when i got featured but it only lasted 1 day, for what i remember being featured for 1 day doesn´t make much difference you would need to keep getting featured to see a real difference.

I was only checking the rankings for U.S. (where I ranked around #150), but I may have ranked in some other countries too. I didn’t know how to check other countries then. I targeted about 15 countries when I ran the appbrain campaign. The way I picked which countries to target was: I looked at my previous 3 months geo-data in admob and choose the top 15 countries with at least 1000 impressions and highest ecpm’s paid to me. With appbrain you have to balance how much you spend to how many downloads you receive per day. Two things affect how many downloads you can get per day. The amount you bid per install and how many countries you target. The more countries you target the more impressions they can give you per day, and the higher your bid, the higher you will show in their app wall. I had no trouble getting downloads for $0.20 per install and targetting about 15 countries.

are we talking about active installs or downloads?

Installs from appbrain, direct installs only began to rise on the final 2 days, after that i maintained about 2000/1500 direct downloads per day for about 2 weeks, then when the 30 days were over it started fall down it´s now near the 300 direct downloads per day what happened to @XdebugX is also true for me

In my opinion advertising isn´t worth it unless you have a top app and a big budget. Using networks like AppBrain is very costly and i don´t think benefit is that great. Again i could have made some mistakes that cost me a successful campaign.

300 per day after so much cash put into ads doesn’t seem worth it.

That´s what me and my brother thought after the experience, it would cost less if you could make direct deals with other fellow developers using Google Analytics to track installs, but i tried that and the problem is most people aren´t interested.

how about search ranking? because that is what i mainly want, getting into the top new free or top free will not happen through advertising. but having my app sit at like #37 when the exact title was searched means that app will never see the light of day.

advertising did boost my ranking, but i don’t know how long it will last and would love to figure that out.

Well if if you advertised and still are in #37 place i can assume you are targeting a very generic search term, believe me that is really hard to target my brother just launched an app that had such generic title that was on #200 place even with advertising so i advised him to change the title to something less generic, so he did and now he is on #8 for the new search term, of course he will well get a lot less potential users but at least he will have some direct downloads and not be buried by tons of apps that have nothing to do the with the search term.

Update: Ive spent alot more on 2 new apps of mine, one is a a general app (facebook) other is more Indian orientated. i went and just advertised my app to every country on appbrain and now the apps combined are in the top 500 of 8 different countries, the immediate revenue from people using my app is only 1-5% of what i advertised initially. lets see how the next ~30 days go.