For long time I suspected checking errors in the console could affect ranking. Responding to reviews also? That would be bad news, I hate reading reviews.
Yeah, they tell it, everybody can tell it.
I always insult people who give my apps 1 or 2 stars (well my apps arenāt worth 4 or 5 stars, but 1 or 2 make me angry if they say āDabstep no music, rock foreverā or sth like that. I mean, isnāt it stupid to judge an app by itās genre? I am metalhead and appreciate every kind of music). Now I even made an app with just one single function because one user gave me 1* because my app had too many functions, the 1-button-app was my answer.
These were just 2 examples how I handle with haters and depending on the country I am still between rank 5 and 9. User interaction means nothing (at least to me)
This app I am talking about is now 3 months old and gained 52k downloads
Be careful with insulting people - in the terms you could get banned for this (like for almost everything else, haha).
Whut, really? xD Fuck
Can you send me the paragraph that states it? I am afraid lol
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/138230?hl=en - āThe use of this feature is a privilege, not a right. Failure to observe the above guidelines and any other Google Play terms may result in a suspension of your application or Google Play Developer account as outlined in the Google Play terms.ā
I can tell by experience that by jumping from one download interval to another, you go considerably up on the rankings, let me explain this. Yesterday i was in the 5.000-10.000 download interval an was in position 20-25 for the word Atlantis. Today, i passed 10.000 downloads so i reached the 10.000 -50.000 interval. Without any change in the daily downloads, i just reached 16. In the past, given that i was featured by Giftiz, i had 1500 downloads in a day (i got 70 downloads normally), and a couple hundreds the per day the whole week. During that period, i only reached 18th position.
My conclusion: Reaching the next download interval, will make you go up in the rankings considerably.
I have observed the same phenomenon for the search term that I am targeting with my app, but only when passing the 100, 1000 and 10000 marks and not when passing the 500 and 5000 marks, as far as I could tell anyway. Iām curious to see if passing 50000 will affect my ranking, but it will probably take me months to get there.
I just invested 350ā¬ on advertising for my new app, it got 2300 downloads and without the ads, I suppose, it would have stopped to probably 300 or 400 in 4-5 days. The problem isā¦ I STILL DONāT APPEAR IN THE āLATEST FREE APPSā section!!! The app is online since 4-5 days and thereās no appearance at all!
How long does it take to make it there? Do I have to wait for a week? Currently google does not giv me ANY visibilityā¦
I dont think it is a matter of time, but downloads volume. I would say you should have around 10.000 downloads in that time period, depending on your app category.
Generally it should not be so high, at least I donāt remember that itās needed 10.000/week to get in the lowest places, in that case I donāt have any hopeā¦ that is obviously a nonsense result without appearing in the lists.
I think that itās a good app that deserves much more downloads, but it will never have them if it is hidden frm all the listsā¦
Maybe I could try to change the app category, currently is inside āGames / Puzzlesā, maybe itās too busy over thereā¦
Did I go wrong setting a 100$/day limit? maybe I could spend all 400$ in one single day? would it have been better?
I cant really tell, i have released just 1 app hehehe. But what i would do if i had some budget for advertisement is to focus on a single market (country). I think it is better to rank top 10 in 1 country than 50 in every single one.
I donāt know if Google evaluates country by country actually.
Anyway, I used AppBrain, after the first day I discovered that I got exactly the 500 installations that I paid for, but they were all distributed in absurd places, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Mexico, Chileā¦ after that I retuned disabling useless countries and China, India and Indonesia went up.
Man, i am from (and currently living in) Chile and is not that absurd! heheehh (no offense taken).
Anyway, good to know about that little ātrickā from AppBrain
In my last app it took about 5 or 6 days to show up in the top new apps section. It was getting 1000 to 1200 downloads per day for those days. Also the top lists are filtered by region, so if all of your downloads are from a different region than you are, you may not see it in the list, but it may be in the list in another country. The games categories I thinkvare harder to rank in, there is lots of competition in those categories. My app was in the entertainment category. It got up to around 150 rank at itās highest point. This was after I hhad stoped buying installs, it continued to get ad many as 1500 installs per day.
Is there a good way to gauge WHICH category one should place an app at (if it can belong to more than one) - for example Entertainment/Music & Audio.
Because each may have different levels of ādifficultyā to get a number 100 (say) - however the visibility of each may vary - for example Entertainment may get a lot of eyeballs, so even at 150 it may have more eyeballs visiting than Music & Audio at 100 (fictitious example).
Earlier I posted two similar apps to different categories - and did not see a huge difference. Then I switched one from one category to another, and then (donāt know if it was that or what) - that app (which switched categories) has never again appeared in the appannie.com āDaily Ranksā (meanwhile the other app which stayed in itās category does appear - for example at 200 in one country and 500 in another etc. - and that keeps changing). So I am really surprised that the one whose category I changed does not appear in any āDaily Ranksā - though their searchability is similar, and their download numbers are nearly the same proportion (i.e. one is slightly more popular and has always been so).
So for all practical purposes it seems that for the app (that changed category) not much has changed, but itās just that it not appears in any Daily Ranks country on appannie.com.
Meanwhile the similar app is in top 500 in 13 countries.
A possible clue
Looking on appannie.com at the Rank History (All Time) - the app (which changed category) shows a graph showing at rank 130 in the old category until March 2013 - after which point there is no graph.
It is as if the app was suddenly dropped (and instantly) from the countries at that date.
However, this date is much earlier than when I switched category (unless I switched it earlier - during some test) - which was the cause of this.
I did not understand, actually, do you think that switching category is a good thing?
The problem is that I think that this app deserves at least 300-500 free downloads/day. Actually, that is the absolute minimum I was thinking, and I consider 300-500 downloads/day a failure. With a good launch I thought it could get 1500-2000/day.
Now this app gets about 50 (fifty) downloads/day, I think I would get the same result with a test āhello worldā app!
I did all is in the check-list of the good marketing manager: keywords careful weight, many translations, graphics, videos, compatibility for tablets, no aggressive ads, good ratings and reviews, advertisingā¦ I really donāt know what else should I do, besides spending 20000ā¬ in advertising.
What remains to me is trying things like changing category, but I think that with 50 downloads/day it will never go anywhere, no matter what I do.
Beppi, try translating your app to other languages. Also, maybe if you try to release a Press Release, or buy some ads on Reddit (they are cheap).
I translated my app in 33 internal languages and the google play description in 43 languagesā¦
And I bought the ads already, I bought 2000 installationsā¦
Now I tried to translate the title of the app, add the english description for every language and move it to another categoryā¦ letās hope.
Iām really astonished by the lack of installations of this app, itās the app where I put the most marketing effort, and the worst downloaded of my 11 appsā¦
My post was what I saw with one app whose category I changed - the problem is I donāt remember if I changed it temporarily a bit earlier (if that would match the time at which appannie.com stopped showing the app in rankings i.e. graph just abruptly stopped).
So I am unsure if changing category effectively puts an end to your ranking in the original category (and no entry to new one) - or what - maybe googleās algorithm gets confused ?
Or it could just be that the app got dropped from rankings.
The problem is it just went away ACROSS the board (in all countries - according to appannie.com) - which is HIGHLY suggestive of being linked to some manual disqualification type action by Google algorithms - rather than a gradual fade away (as usually happens with rankings).
This issue is very similar to the example given in todayās post:
http://forums.makingmoneywithandroid.com/marketing-methods/1988-interesting-observation-google-play-store.html
QUOTE:
A while ago I noticed an app named āDownload Copyleft music MP3ā (it used to go by a different name a couple of months ago, same package name though)
This app has over 10,000,000 downloads and 700k+ ratings. Yet, it does not seem to show up anywhere.
One could venture that this type of sudden removal from rankings is either linked to:
- some manual disqualification
- some Google algorithm deciding your app needs to be removed (??) suddenly and from every country at the same time (highly odd, because otherwise the rankings across countries generally are NOT correlated - i.e. their rise and fall curves seem to be based on the dynamic in each country - as it is found and rises etc.)
Regarding your surprise at the marketing effort and outcome - that is similar to what many here have reported (David also earlier commented that his iphone launcher app was an unexpected hit - though in retrospect it makes sense that something to do with āAppleā or āiphoneā would surely find keyword discovery advantages on Google Play).
Perhaps it is something like that (we are talking other than some inherent issue with the game/app). Have you shown your app to your target audience and gotten some feedback - maybe they can point out some issue. Occasionally there can be issues on some devices you donāt find out until someone mentions that in reviews.
However in your case - it seems more an issues of ādiscoveryā - and so perhaps is related to keyword search (which you suggest you have already optimized for ?).
I donāt know, I really donāt knowā¦ 44 downloads today. The same as the chronometer. 1/10 of what I considered a failure.
And I did advertising, keywords optimization, video, graphics, translations, optimization for tablets, I got 22 very good reviews and even made a facebook page.
Without doing anything any app I did got 200/300+ daily downloads as a minimum, and any app I did was less optimized than this one.
Bah. This is awkward. Please tell me if you have any other ideaā¦