Well I have some conflicting results to report from using paid installs (AppBrain).
I spent about $1000 to promote an app - and ran the campaign over some days - got the installs to rise (as much as you pay).
The problem however seems to be that when you STOP the campaign then Google REALLY penalizes you for the pathetic stats that you now seem to have:
- low installs
- “declining” installs (and not just slowly declining but huge difference)
As a result your DAU (daily average users) is high - but new installs per day is low. And you just bleed out the users i.e. attrition from the existing users DOMINATES the new installs - so you have very bad “new install” vs. “uninstall” ratio.
Either because of this or whatever - I now find that the daily downloads for the app are LOWER than the base organic installs I was seeing BEFORE I started the paid install campaign.
In fact when I released the app - I saw a steadily rising new install number (very slow rise) - but it was rising.
Now I see a declining new install per day number - and it is going down more and more - maybe it will recover eventually.
But the “shock” of the artificial installs and then deprivation of those installs - may make the app see like something screwy to Google algorithms maybe (?)
Anyway, this was something one wonders about app installs - since small developers would not have the budget to continue paid installs indefinitely - maybe a month or so.
On the other hand - it MIGHT be a different story if the paid installs are done at such a level that app rises to very top of it’s category. In that case maybe new installs may start coming in (?)
However, ANYTIME you STOP spending money on app installs - it WILL appear in the stats as a decline - and that may undo some of the improvement in rankings. Although ideally it may still leave your app at a higher ranking level than you started with.
that is the reason why advertisers like DU Battery and Clean Master can’t stop advertising. If they do so , they will fall down in rankings
Ok, something else to report from the AppBrain app installs - I also had done some Tapjoy incentivized installs at the end.
But overall results of it are clear when I look at the Google Developer Play statistics.
If I look at the all-time “Current installs by device” (i.e. current number of existing installations) - the slope takes a massive hit AFTER the paid install campaign is over !!
That is - the slope of the rising total installs is high in first month - then settles to about 1/3 of that (i.e. the slope of the curve) - and this CONTINUES through the paid app installs campaign and the Tapjoy incentivized app install campaign.
BUT after these campaigns are over - I can clearly see that the slope of the curve HALVES !!!
That is - this suggests that if I had NOT done the app install campaigns - I might have been BETTER OFF just sticking to the installs Google was giving me … !!!
This is something I had worried about - with a limited $1000 or so budget - about it’s impact after campaign is over - and the imnpact doesn’t seem to be good - i.e. Google seems to have relegated the app somewhere where the downloads are half what they would have been otherwise.
This type of impact was apparent even immediately after the campaign - as I noted that while the app had been rising in the rankings (appannie stats) up to that point - yet after the app campaign was stopped the app started falling in the rankings.
Also there does seem to be an element of the Google algorithm “making up it’s mind” about an app - i.e. once it decides - then it seems the app will remain in doldrums (unless there is a kick start from being mentioned virally somewhere - which will increase downloads which will improve rankings). But otherwise it seems that Google can change it’s “opinion” about an app on a dime …
Now it is possible that if I had not done the paid campaign - that the current installs may have reduced in slope over time … but for now it is very clear from the graph about the before and after periods (around the app campaign time period).