I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions for a decent advertising option for one of my paid apps.
We have a puzzle app that contains ~400 puzzles with 20+ available for free and an IAP to unlock the rest for $1.99 (it is rated 4.2 stars, with 4000+ reviews).
Roughly 1 in 10 will go for the paid option which means we make ~ $1.1-1.4 dollar per purchase or $0.10 - 0.14 per install. I’ve struggled to find any legitement paid advertising options that provides a positive ROI.
The additional complication is that the game is in English only (it is a word game). Our core segment is age 40+, English speaking and more likely to be female.
Any suggestions for advertising sources would be great (ideally something a bit different).
It might be that with such a low revenue per install it is just a non starter?
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First of all, it is not paid app. It is free app with IAP.
Anyway, I’m afraid you are very optimistic with your assumption about 10% conversion rate. On the other hand, with 4000 reviews you should be probably at ~500k downloads and 50k purchases, if it is right then congratulations, good job.
Most people advertise their apps because they want to get more organic traffic (better rank in their category, higher positions on keywords, appearing in “similar app” list, word of mouth), not to get immediate positive ROI.
Having said that, check out shoutcart.com, it might work good for you if you find the instagram account with the right audience.
[edit]
Wait a sec… Your app is puzzle game with 400+ puzzles or a word game?
He said the conversion IS 10%, not what he thinks it will be.
On the other hand, 4000 reviews is more like 100k downloads, not 500k ;-). As an example, the game in my signature has 77k downloads with 3700 ratings, although i believe its ratings/downloads ratio is above average
Maybe you can drastically increase your income by letting all the levels be free, sell IAPs in form of hints/new functionalities and add ads to monetize the non-buyers.
@BaksaiApps, yeah, I was editing my post when I realised he said his conversion rate is 10% and he has 4000 reviews, so he should have quite big sample of data. I guess I did not re-read my whole post before clicking submit, my fault.
Your app has 77k downloads and 3700 ratings, not reviews, and that is a big difference. From what I’ve noticed so far, less than 1/4 of the people who rate the app also write a review. When I check on AppAnnie, it says your app has less than 3700 ratings and ~680 reviews. I did a quick math, with your review to download ratio, he should have 476k downloads.
And yep, it could be word based puzzle game, but I wanted @surf26 to confirm that he is talking about one, free word puzzle game with in app purchases in the whole post.
Sorry about the initial post, there are some mistakes - yes it isn’t a paid app, instead it is free with IAP (a big difference otherwise the downloads wouldn’t be as high), also you are right in that we have 4000+ ratings not reviews (again a big difference). My total downloads are just short of 500k. The downloads are all for our Crosswords US (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.teazel.crossword.us.full)
With regards conversion we get between 1/10 to 1/14 making a purchase, hence meaning we need an advertising solution at around $0.10 - 0.14 per install (to breakeven). My gut feeling is that isn’t possible to use an traditional source Facebook/Twitter and instead I should look for other sources (or find a way of increasing the value of a customer / or convert more).