Let me share with this community how i manage to finally get ahold if this google play algorithm lately.
First of all this guide is useful if you have IAP, I’ve never tried to monetize with ads, also as an indie developer (only 2 person team) we cant manage to make a good game from scratch, so we mostly buy sources from china, fix them, modify them and make a whole new game with a few weeks of work.
That said as most of you know paying for actually decent organic installs by google ads or facebook ads is extremely expensive, specially if you want players that spend some money, for example if you aim for like 10 cents installs, google ads/meta/apple ads will mostly show your ads to people that have near 0 purchasing history, that is for a fact.
As we dont have much budget to spend on ads and we are not great marketers we had to choose to buy keyword installs, they werent working the last few times we try, but we had insist.
So lets go step by step, first of all lets discuss the ASO optimization thing (biggest lie ever, at least nowdays) .
We just research similar games that were on the top 10 charts on some keywords we were interested we then got some paragraphs and asked IA to rephrase them keeping they same keywords, (it doesnt matter if some of the features doesnt match yours, no one actually reads them, is just for the crawler).
At the beggining you will not have many downloads and consequently keywords indexed so you have 2 options pay for cheap ads or target CPI installs from other website.
Ok now they keyword install thing, this is not new we all know about this but this is how i found it actually do work.
What keyword installs service to use? All services are bots, but some are better than others, I’ve tested like a lot of them and imo i think keyapp.top is probably only the few that works.
First of all dont be a newb like us and try to target keywords like “mmorpg” “rpg” “adventure” “fantasy” at start, it will just not work even if you spend a lot and key get ranked, google will outrank you fast most of the times.
So what did we do, well we started by targetting key semantic family of this keywords, like this: pay attention on the install amount, one of the features i like on keyapp is that if you select smart campaign it actually show you keywords and similar keywords you are ranked at: like this, select your app and the country and leave the fields empty, it will show you something like this:
About the score (that is volume) i recommend you double check the keywords volume in other aso tools like apptweak, now after you slected the keywords when you start a keyword installs campaign is “IMPERATIVE” that you choose a logic amount of installs, for example if you are rank 200 in certain keyword is impossible that you can get 30 installs out of it, or even 10, so we do like this, we select the keyword and for 5 days we do very little installs,
Unfortunatly , 5 is the minimum you can actually order, 2 or 3 would have been a better option, check the price only 4 dollars and as this keywords is not competitive you will get on top 5 rank of it most certain, with very litle amount, you do this for like 20 or 30 keywords and it will boost also the rank of the keyword we actually want to rank high “mmorpg”
Check this out with only 5 dollars u get from rank 250 to top 3
If you cant get any keyword indexed because you dont have any downloads, try a CPI campaign in the same site, make sure you enter your keyword on the Title field and after a few days it will get indexed like magic.
This is how my downloads were boosted dramatically, and as you can check are “explore downloads” (organic)
Also the revenue increased like 300%
I hope i was able to help you get more visibility, I know as an indie developer how hard it can be now days.
The tools i used for this
(keyword research) https://www.apptweak.com
(most important for keyword installs) https://www.keyapp.top