How to setup burst campaigns on Instagram for mobile apps and games

Happy Holidays everyone!

Instagram recently grew to 400MM active monthly users and positioned itself as a new, under rated channel for cheap mobile app installs!

In addition to official Sponsored ads, there exists an under represented community of Instagram publishers (accounts with large followings) that shoutout (feature @username1 mentions) each other’s accounts inside image captions and share links to affiliate offers & other promotional messages.

According to Fiksu Index, average iOS CPI stands at $1.54 and Android CPI is $2.27, with the costs increasing at 40% rate year over year.

In this article we will explain step by step process of how you can take advantage of Instagram shoutouts @username1 tags inside image captions) to drive mobile app installs for as low as $0.10 CPI on iOS and Android.

Read More on our blog!

yeah and if you need installs on android play store and ios store, you can contact me at www.fiverr.com/malik1994

No thanks, don’t need you spam here

intersting, but seems like no accounts are suitable for promoting games… can you please help me find some?

might be worth doing if you had some app related users

nice informations

actually, most of the Instagram accounts that have large follower count (1m+), and decent shoutcart score (above 0.5) are suitable to promoting games. if you read in the blog post, the results section, you will see that all the games were promoted on funny image/video accounts to gain those results.

all the users are mobile app users, and instagram users are more likely to install new apps from accounts they follow, rather than sponsored ads in their feed. checkout the blog post i linked to, there is a results section (last section) where I bring up a lot of successful examples of these campaigns.

Just wanted to share my experience with this type of advertising:

After setting up my instagram account exactly as specified on the blog (and getting confirmation from support that the entire setup is fine), I ordered a $200 shout from @nailsclip (1.5m followers).

Results (as tracked by bitly.com) were: 18 clicks. So I paid $11 per click.

I don’t know how many installs I had but I guess it’s irrelevant.

When I contacted support to get their opinion on this, they said they are puzzled by the ineffectiveness of the campaign. Which is pretty ironic considering I wanted to advertise a jigsaw puzzle game! They also recommended I also try new, smaller shouts to see if I can get better results. No thanks, I am not going to use such a method ever again!

Bottom line is: this is totally ineffective and was the most expensive advertising campaign I ever tried (and I did try a lot of them!).

thanks for your test! I believe it brought you 1-2 downloads and the CPI is $100!

Thanks for trying shoutcart, it seems that your choice of instagram account to shoutout from was not the best, and the broad teenage female audience of @nailsclip was not interested in your jigsaw puzzle game (you did mention your users are 45-55 year old females). Like I advised before, its important to start slow (with $5-$10 shoutouts) to get a feel of IG audience, to get your targeting right.

Instagram in general is skewed towards younger audience, and sometimes your app/game will not appeal to that audience. Its important to test individual accounts as well as instagram as a marketing channel in general.

Let me do some math.

You are advertising $0.1 CPI from the US. For that to happen with a $200 shout, I would need 2000 installs. To get 2000 installs, I would need at least 6000 clicks (decent conversion ratio in organic installs on Google Play is about 25%-30%). I got 18 clicks.

18 clicks / 6000 clicks = 0.3%. That percentage is, for sure, not because of the bad choice in targeting from my behalf but from the poor quality of this type of marketing campaign.

Sorry, but getting 0.3% of what you’re advertising is pretty convincing for me not to try this again.

How come you are now saying I chose the wrong instagram account if in the email I received from support I was told that “I think you picked a pretty nice account to do a shoutout on”? And I was also advised to try some other nail accounts because they have my target audience.

Support also recommended this instagram account for $5: @useless.knowledge. I added it to my cart but it is still pending (after a week since the order). And the name of the instagram account seems to have been removed from the order, like it was removed from your system or something.

It’s simple: the service is seriously overpriced and NEVER WORKS ANYWHERE

even the worst colorless NON-TARGETED banner Ad has 0.2% click through rate, when you got 18 clicks there are at best only 10k impressions - i.e. 10k persons who have LOOKED at the the shout out MAXIMUM, so even if you got the best App in this world with best targetted IG audience you may still get only like 50 clicks at best.

the rest of million+ “followers” are robots.

all the shout outs on that shoutcart shall have 90% price cut minimum or anyone trying the services are just ripped off

Why not change the pricing model to pay for actual clicks or installs? if the results aren’t delivered for whatever reason, the cost should fall on the service provider and not on the buyer.
Also, if the service is legit a few occasional failures shouldn’t burden much on your service (while they are quite a heavy blow for the buyer… even if he’s just an unlucky one in the middle of many successful campaigns)

I don’t use instagram so I don’t have any info regarding it.

Spending $200 directly in intragram ads might be more worth. There will be around 200k impressions, given 1% CTR, it was 2k clicks.

Sorry but instagram advertising is not for you.

Also, I clicked on the google play link of the game you are advertising, and its actually not available on google play in USA, maybe thats why your campaign didn’t result in any installs.

This is coming from someone that never ordered a shoutout from us. I encourage you to give it a try some time!

We have lots of campaigns running daily, and a lot of our customers are repeat customers.

I understand, it takes a little time to test new channel to see if its the right fit, but I would also like to point out that Instagram Shoutouts with Shoutcart don’t work for ALL the games, examples would include everything that does not fit with 15-30 year old group of users.

Its also important to have your app/game polished and ready for prime time. No amount of advertising will help promote an unfinished, poorly made game.

It’s funny how you’re saying this now after I’ve spent $200 trying it and you didn’t say it before I purchased.

The game got 184 installs from USA today, so it is available on GP. If you clicked on the link from my signature, then that game has been removed from the store more than a year ago and it is not the game I ordered the shout for.
And I was measuring the number of clicks, I clearly stated I received 18 clicks, not installs.

Those two mistakes make it pretty clear for me that you don’t even know what game I am talking about nor the results I got from ordering the shout. Which is a pretty clear indication that you’re not even trying to figure out what went wrong, but you’re happy to have the money in your pocket.