Pay-Per-Install

Has anybody tried a Pay-Per-Install campaign? If so, what was the result and is it worth it? I just saw this option on the appbrain website and would like to get some opinions before I invest in anything.

I would be submitting a lite version of my app, which normally gets around 20 downloads a day, hoping that people would upgrade to the full version. My app has been in the market for 10 months now and I am really wanting to boost my downloads.

It’s a nice way to supplement income without upsetting users, but it no way replaces other banner types, for me at least.

From what I hear Smartwall from Airpush pays better, so when they get their separate SDK out I might replace Appbrain.

I Think he is talking about wanted to pay to get more new users.

Yer right. Doh. I gotta stop speed reading.

And no, its not worth it with those numbers IMO.

Well, thanks for your opinion Dan. I will hold off on this then and continue to search for other ideas.

I just ran a test PPI campaign on AppBrain. I loaded up with $100 credit to try it out (plus some money I had left over) - and within 20 minutes all the funds were spent! I was bidding with a maximum CPI of $0.60. Here’s the stats:

Impressions: 8,513
Clicks: 638
CTR: 7.49%
Installs: 274
IR: 3.22%
Average Cost per Install: $0.44
Total Cost: $120.13

So yes, I got a the users that I paid for. But seeing $100 whiz away that quickly was a little scary… and I didn’t see any change in my AppBrain listings after running the ads (no boost of position, or extra comments or anything).

Of course, if you had $1000 spare cash lying around, this would be a quick way to rack up a few thousand installs :smiley:

Was your app already pretty high on the list in the market? I can barely even find my app in Google Play unless I use very specific keywords, or else you will have to scroll down a few hundred positions. If I could get a couple of hundred downloads, I’m hoping that it will really boost my position. My downloads have actually dropped over the past couple of weeks, so it would probably take over a month now to get 200 downloads. I’m not sure what’s going on.

I enjoyed playing the free version of your game and gave it a possitive review. Maybe you can make some changes to the questions screen. The rest of the app looks great and nice animations but the four awnser boxes look a bit dull. Also you have pretty good download rates in my oppinion. Try improving the game and get it reviewed.

I did a PPI campaign with Flurry when WordHero started. I was able to jumpstart the leaderboards this way - which was important when the whole point was to see other people playing!

Hi there mind, what is the cost per install with Flurry ?

Something horrid at the time… like $0.70 ?

Thanks Martin! I left you a review of your wish list app, which is a very nice app, and left you some feedback on your wish list thread! I will keep working on mine and try to get it looking better.

Thanks for the info mind. I will check out Flurry. I have a really tight budget right now and .70 maybe too high. It looks like appbrain starts at .20. But if you get really good results, it could be worth it.

I just started a Pay-Per-Install campaign on AppBrain. I’m doing a max bid of $0.60 per install. It’s been a day and only have 8 installs, a little over 2000 impressions and 40 clicks. I may mess around with it some more and see how it goes!

One important factor determining number of impressions there is install ratio. The higher IR% the more impressions you would get even for smaller bids. From my experience you need at least 0.7% to start getting some significant traffic and 1% to get significant cheap traffic.

This has a nice side effect - IR/CTR is the ratio of users that come to your market page to those who downloaded and you can use it as a feedback loop for optimizing your download page. I made a number of informed changes in the past that resulted in noticeable increase of IR%.

This was for my new app, Fake iPhone 5, so when I ran the campaign it wasn’t popular. In fact, you couldn’t find it on Google Play no matter what you searched for. And AppBrain hadn’t loaded the ratings/reviews yet, so it was pretty much a ghost listing.

Quite surprising, given marwfair’s results…

IR: 3.22% - that’s why :slight_smile:

My PPI campaign finished. I spend $100 and it took 4 days. These are my results:
Installs: 143
IR: 0.65%
AVG CPI: $0.57

I’m not sure if it was worth it though. I don’t even think my app moved up any in Google Play(still can’t find it unless you scroll down forever or use very specific search words). My downloads did go up to about 50 per day for those days, up from the usual 10. Now I’m just back to where I started.

That blows.
$100,- for less then 150 installs. You better try submitting your app to review sites and hope for a review.

Do you know of some good review sites that I could try and does this usually cost money?

Most sites offer free and paid submit for yout app. But most free submits do not get reviewed. A good review will give you a lot of new users. You could try androidpolice, thats one of the biggest Android blogs.