Best way to spend $3000 on advertising?

Hi all

I have a budget of $3000 and I would like to know if any of you would know the best solution to getting my app promoted with this budget.

I have looked at this service here(scroll down until you see Top App Charts): BombAppromotion | iPhone, iPad,Mac,Android app promotion

I am considering about paying for the Top App charts($3000) listed above but am not sure weather that would be the most optimal promotion solution.

If anyone could give me a little guidance here, thanks.

$3000 is a decent budget for app promotion for a decent quality app. I personally would put that money towards a region targeted ppi burst campaign using reputable services like Appbrain, Flurry, Chartboost, and Facebook Mobile ads. I’d be very careful with sites with little to no reputation in this area as this is a good way to lose money. I’ve looked up bombapppromotion and could find very little data on them besides their self promoted posts. Their descriptions are extremely vague and unclear. I.e. their “Top Charts” option guarantees that you’ll be in the Top 100 for multiple subcategories/categories, yet it it doesn’t state in which regions (This is VERY important!) or a time-frame for achieving this. I guess you could contact them, but I’d avoid any agency that won’t even spend the time to put together a well informed and complete description of their services. Good luck to you!

appbrain is shit as for $0.2 you will get installs from countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq etc. Better pay more for quality users.

$.20 is appbrain’s minimum bid. You can do targeted campaigns and adjust your bid to whatever you want…

Thanks for the advice. I am currently looking into AppBrain and it seems pretty decent so far. What results could I expect from spending $3000 with AppBrain? have you ever used the service, if yes, what results did you receive from the money you invested?

To give you an example of a much lower budget campaign and how using your money wisely can lead to triple the downloads

http://forums.makingmoneywithandroid.com/marketing-methods/14059-how-i-reached-top-50-adventure-category-india-google-play-appstore-long-read-4.html

After you read the 1st post which is very in depth then hit me with any questions you may have. The only question I have is what category are you aiming for with your game or app. Read the post 1st it’s very informative.

Well it all depends on which regions you’ll be targeting and your bid amount which pretty much dictates how many installs you’ll be getting each day. For example, if you run a campaign in the UK, set a minimum bid of $.50, you’ll get 6000 installs. How far those 6000 installs go as far as organic reach is concerned depends on a few factors including your app quality, competitiveness in your category, user retention ratio and rate of installs per day.

In my infancy (6 months ago :wink: ), I used Appbrain on my first game investing about $1000. I made the mistake of doing a broadly targeted campaign with a $.20 minimum bid. Overall during the campaign, I got around 400-500 installs per day which got me into the 56th spot in Top New Free Arcade within the US. On average I was getting 200-250 organics/day during this month. Revenue from interstitials and banner ads alone were $460 after the 1st month which was a 46% return on my investment. After the 30 day new app window, organics dropped to about 70/day. I’ve since made back my investment, and am now turning a profit from it although it is a bit paltry at about $3-$5/day. The campaign has helped my game rank better in search and I assume that’s where most of my organics are coming from now. I used this game as a test case to better understand google’s app market and have improved my methods since. I’ve seen better days by narrowing my targeting campaign, monetizing more efficiently, and investing more $$$ into campaigns to achieve higher rankings.

The app I am looking to promote is only available in the UK and is under tools category, how many downloads per day whould you say it needs to get into the top within tools for the UK? The app I am looking to promote has been out for 11 days so I’m guessing it would have a chance if it blew up to be in top new. I also have read your post prior to posting this thread and I found it very interesting. Good job on making the most out of the $$$ you had! :slight_smile:

Could you elaborate on this bid thing, what is it?

Ok since your app is only in UK and it’s in tools section then that’s the only country you can promote in. U.K is tougher marketplace but tools section isn’t as tough as games section. I figure you only need 400 downloads a day over 4-5 days to rank high (top 50) .

What are you basing the 400 a day on? AppAnnie?

No I remember reading a postmortem on someone who made a puzzle game and in the US and UK he needed 400 downloads a day to rank which he reached somewhere in the top #30 in UK a couple of months ago. Now since puzzle games is a weak category 400 downloads a day was enough to rank. I don’t remember the game so I don’t have a link but I just remember the stats and downloads. Since tools is similar in that it’s not a strong category 400 a day should be enough. That’s what I based my numbers off of.

In a PPI campaign, you are competing with others to get your installs via an automated auction system, therefore your bids must be competitive in order get the installs you need. Some regions are more desirable than others, hence you must raise your minimum bids accordingly in order to get the installs you want. Additionally, weekend campaigns require higher bids than on weekdays…

hi developer!
Have you got any mail from bombappromotion?
Just be careful, the service is complete a scam!
My developer partner try to use their service and email Terry Lewis, the CEO of the service.

My dev partner interested to use android bomb rank service for 3000usd, after the fund trasferred, for 1-2 weeks the email got responded, but when ask when the service happened, he dont get any clear answer, the bombappromotion always answer to wait for a few days because its a big project, but after 1 month + no any respons from him and no progress.

I publish this news to warn any game dev to be careful!

Here its the bombappromotion CEO, terry lewis, please be carefull and avoid this service: https://www.linkedin.com/pub/terry-lewis/31/391/834

This news is not for black campaign a service. But this is a fact!
We re developer that need promotion service, but be careful. There are lot of scam, and this is the one!

hi developer!
Have you got any mail from bombappromotion?
Just be careful, the service is complete a scam!
My developer partner try to use their service and email Terry Lewis, the CEO of the service.

My dev partner interested to use android bomb rank service for 3000usd, after the fund trasferred, for 1-2 weeks the email got responded, but when ask when the service happened, he dont get any clear answer, the bombappromotion always answer to wait for a few days because its a big project, but after 1 month + no any respons from him and no progress.

I publish this news to warn any game dev to be careful!

Here its the bombappromotion CEO, terry lewis, please be carefull and avoid this service: https://www.linkedin.com/pub/terry-lewis/31/391/834

This news is not for black campaign a service. But this is a fact!
We re developer that need promotion service, but be careful. There are lot of scam, and this is the one!

Surely 400 downloads a day isn’t enough to rank, I have an app in photography that gets 2.3-2.5k installs per day and it isn’t even in the top 100 ;(

Since when are tools and puzzle games weak categories? Tools category has over 80,000 apps and relatively low percentage of crap apps. Puzzle games category is the most popular game category and definitely not a weak category.

Also I really doubt that 400 downloads a day for 4-5 days is enough to rank around 50 in Top Free tools category in the UK. For a reference, you can check out the most popular tool apps in Top New Free section in United Kingdom. As of August 19, the two top apps are Remote Control for TV and HTC Sense Input. In Top Free tools category they are ranked 22nd and 222nd respectively. Both these apps were released a month ago and are in 1M-5M downloads range. As you can see both of them have been very popular and despite their high number of downloads and excellent rank in the new free tools category they are not ranked very high in the free tools category.

Now, let’s assume that 5% of the downloads have been from the UK. That’s at least 50,000 UK downloads, probably more. Comparing it with your “400 downloads for 5 days” estimation I think it’s safe to say that it was a “slight” underestimation from your side.

The casual games category is the strongest , you can check app brain for stats. Casual followed by Arcade and action. When you see a 1,000,000-5,000,000 remember that counts all downloads from all countries not just U.S. They show the total amount in google play not just the amount in the store your in.

Also note that’s over the course of a month and not a week .

No, Puzzle games is the strongest by a clear margin over casual. You can see it from here Top categories on Google Play - AppBrain

Yes, of course the download numbers are total worldwide installs. That’s why I took only 5% of it to get a rough estimation for the UK installs. And the country under question was not the US but the UK!