Advertising PAID app

Hi Guys,

I have a portfolio of free apps and now I am starting to move to PAID apps, however I can’t find an efficient way to advertise PAID apps.

My first paid app is a XMas live wallpaper: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sparkymobile.xmasview

So I would like to know what kind of method you guys like to advertise paid apps.

Here are a few things I tried:

  • Admob: I’ve got almost no response after running a small campaign. I was expecting that conversions rates were smaller than on my free apps, but not zero, as I’ve got. I even opened an issue and admob team is investigating if there was a problem on the campaign.

  • Flurry: I was excited to try Flurry app Circle, but after a while I realized that it was not going to work as expected. App Circle uses CPI method with minimum bid of $0.75. I’ve got some installations after raising it to $1.1, but the problem is that Flurry counted about 80 installs and I’ve got less than 30 on google play. After talking with support guys they told me the problem would be related to piracy, but even after I implemented LVL protection and removed almost all pirate links from the web I still got same numbers. Flurry support team was very nice with me, they refunded me, but they also confessed that app circle was not much efficient with paid apps and the performance that I had was not far from the average. They recommended me to use it with free or iAP apps.

  • TapJoy/AppBrain/ChartBoost: they don’t support CPI advertising for PAID apps. There are many networks that don’t tell you they don’t support CPI method for paid apps until you register and pay.

  • AppEggs: I’ve got a XMas package that included review and banner. It started yesterday, and I’ve got no downloads response until now. I will update the post later.

So does anyone have similar experiences to share?

Regards,
Rodrigo.

Rodrigo, have you tried in-app billing ? Release a free version with most of the features locked down and give the user the option to unlock them through in-app billing.

I think through in-app billing will be the best to advertise.As it has most of the features locked down.You may also try advertisement tool that best match with the marketing strategies.

The problem with in-app billing is that this kind of app goes to top/new FREE rankings. So besides having much more competitors, these competitors have no locked features, which makes harder for a in-app billing app to perform well on the rankings. The PAID app ranking has less competitors and the audience is much more likely to really buy the app. I’ve tried in-app billing in some apps, but they did not get a good raking performance as the the free ones.

I agree about in-app billing, and I also find it difficult to promote paid apps. what we have done so far is to have a free version (with limited features or adds, but still a good usable app) and also a paid version of the same app, the free version is easier to promote, and, will expose the users to the paid version as well.

Roger, I understand your approach. Ans is your paid app quickly pirated?

Well, my partner found one of them in a piracy site - someone was asking if anyone can crack one of our paid apps for him, in return he offered some kind of credits to use at the same site.
We contacted the site owners and asked them to remove it, which they did.
Other than that, most piracy we find is actually directed towards the free apps. We can see in the analytics that our free versions are being downloaded from different sites, like sites from china where they can’t use Google. But I don’t mind about that, since it’s free anyway, the only little harm is you see less downloads at the play store than the actual downloads.

rbdias: How did the App eggs promotion turn out?

Last year I created a Christmas Live Wallpaper as a paid app. I quickly found that:

  1. People are reluctant to buy a paid app without trying it first.
  2. It is difficult to promote a paid app, e.g. appbrain don’t allow campaigns for paid apps.

So I quickly put together a free version with limited functionality, which had a button to download the full version. Then I had the problem of promoting two apps. I focussed on getting installs for the free version, and hoped those users would convert to the paid version. I used $100 of appbrain promotion and did the usual forum posts asking for reviews etc. By 25th December I had peaked at 1000 current installs, and about 60 installs of the paid version. So, not that much of a commercial success.

This year I decided to try again, focussing on just having the free app which now has an in-app purchase to unlock it. I hoped this would simplify the marketing (one app instead of two) and would get more conversions (easier for users to upgrade the free version rather than have to download the separate full version). The problems this year seem to be:

  1. My app does not have the benefit of being in the 30 day ‘new app’ listings, so I am struggling to get noticed
  2. Because its a Christmas app it has had virtually no installs in the last 10 months, so I think from a SEO point of view it looks like an unpopular/dead app, and doesn’t appear high in the rankings.
  3. To access the main feature of the app you need to unlock it via an in-app purchase. Users don’t realise this when they download it and then get angry that they have to pay. This has resulted in several 1 star reviews which have badly affected my ratings, even though I’ve tried to make it clear in the description that you need to pay to get all the features.

Of course there are still a few weeks until Christmas so I’m hoping things will pick up.

If I was to try to do this all over again I would:

  1. Not make a seasonal product, since that limits your selling window and means most of the year your app looks dead.
  2. Think harder about the balance of free/paid version features, so that free users feel encouraged to pay for extras not forced to pay for essential features.

Oh yeah, and my app is: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=uk.co.backtrace.santafacefree