Best way to pay for downloads

Hey guys,

I am looking to promote an app in entertainment category of Play Store and would like to get into top 5 new free list. I have $2,000 to spend and was thinking to use appbrain and tapjoy to drive downloads to my app. I had couple questions:

[ol]
[li]Do you think $2,000 is enough to achieve big enough boost in downloads to get into that spot?
[/li][li]Also, do you think I should spread it out in $200-$300/day budget or would it be better to spend all of it as fast as I can?
[/li][/ol]

I would love to get input on this from someone who has done something like this before. I know there are a few people on this forum who could shed the light on this :slight_smile:

My last app, I spent 1k with appbrain. This was enough to get it in top new free in multiple countries. It went as high as 135 in US. I used appbrain and set my bid to $0.20 and picked about 15 countries by looking at old admob stats which countries gave the highest ecpm (with at least a few k impressions). You would be surprised at some of the countries that give good ecpm. Also I think the faster the better, don’t set a daily budget. It will still take a few days to a couple weeks depending on your bid and number of countries.

Tapjoy may get you a higher rank, I don’t know. I think the minimum bid there is 0.10 so you could get twice the downloads. Although it may not work, it depends on how high googles algorythm counts uninstalls. It could actually bring you a lower rank. I haven’t used them so couldn’t say.

thanks, I’ve read your post in the other thread as well…

Did you spend that $1k as fast as you could or did u spread it across a few days? I know your category is a lot more competitive and the download rate required to get on top new free list is different, but do you mind sharing what were the daily downloads you got that did not attribute to your marketing spend, meaning the free downloads from the list exposure you got?

I spent it as fast as I could, but it still took 3 or 4 days to spend. Appbrain tends to ramp up. First day or two you may not get a lot of impressions but they should start to go up. I paid for 5k downloads but got over 40k for the first 30 days.

I’ve invested more than $1000 in the past 2 weeks with appbrain on a game I recently released.

I targeted countries like USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand. For these countries, I used a bid of around $0.50 and got around 150 downloads per day. I got listed in top new free Brain & Puzzle like this: USA - 59; UK - 55; Australia and New Zealand - I am guessing top 10-20 (can’t check).

To my surprise, there are not of a lot of organic installs coming my way. So far around 75% of the total installs I got were paid.

I also tried admob and I liked their results. First you create a campaign and set a bid: 0.01 or 0.02. After 1-2 days where you spend the money at a conversion cost of >$1 you can edit the campaign and set the bid to be CPA instead of CPC. I don’t know exactly what that means (I am guessing it has to do with the double click for download admob button) but once I set it to CPA the cost for each install (around 25 per day) got a lot cheaper: about 0.3-0.4 (cheaper than appbrain). I targeted the same countries as with appbrain so you should expect a lot more installs if you go worldwide.

What countries did you target and what top lists were you visible in? I paid for 3000 downloads in 2 weeks and I only have a total of 4000 downloads.

I was not aware that admob had CPA model, perhaps I will reconsider it into my marketing strategy. thanks for the share

It does in the new admob but you can’t set it from the beginning. You will need to first use the CPC model and after around $20 spent (when there are enough impressions/conversions) you will be able to change your campaign to work for CPA. It took around 1-2 days and $20 for me until CPA was available. But the results after that with using CPA are better than CPC.

I believe these are the countries I targeted, if I remember correctly:

South Africa
Denmark
Australia
Italy
Indonesia
United Kingdom
Hong Kong
Norway
Germany
United States
Poland
Spain
Japan
France
Switzerland
Israel
Netherlands
Singapore
United Arab Emirates
Belgium

I don’t remember which top lists I was in, but I remember getting to #135 in the U.S.

I just realized that I might be asking too specific of a question, that even if anyone had an answer to, they wouldnt want to share. Thanks to all who did tho.

I am about to start running my campaign in the following weeks, I will share what I find out

I would be glad to share everything I know. Just ask if you need to know something. :slight_smile: