When promoting my games, so far I have used ayet-Studios to buy incentivised installs, as low as 0.093/install.
The advantage is that you can get up to 3-4000 installs/day (world-wide) at the same price, but the retention is bad: 30% from one day to another.
How much do you think retention impacts an app rankings? (search and chart rankings).
Do you have any experience with AppBrain or Facebook?
What is your retention, and what are the prices for installs?
Do you use country targeting, or world wide?
I’m pretty sure Google takes retention into account now, but sheer download numbers are the main factor for app rankings. I doubt that bad retention is going to undo that work.
IMO once u reach 1M installs, u land in a special place where ur app gets listed similar apps of other famous apps. So invent installs not that bad. If u purchasing installs, purchase a mix of incent and non-incent.
I know your post, I have studied it, and that is where I found out about AyetStudios.
In my experience, being 50th in your category (for Adventure let’s say, in India) is not gonna make much of a difference, meaning you won’t get so many installs just because of that.
Being on the similar list of an app that gets many downloads is far more valuable.
As an example, I had two games, both with similar rankings in Adventure in the same countries, and one was getting 3-4 times more installs than the other because was on the similar
list of other Adventure games. The other one didn’t have many Adventure apps around it (when searching for it’s name, or the keywords it was ranked for in Google Play, there were only few adventure games that showed in the search results up before and after it).
Eventually the one with less installs pretty much died, getting from 2-300 installs / day to ~10 installs in a couple of months.
Now if you reach top 5 in your category, I suppose that get you much more downloads (I am just assuming since I didn’t go higher than 15-20 on Adventure category in a couple of countries).
My question is, how do you guys think the Similar sistem works on Google Play?
I know the number of downloads (and the category ofcourse) is very important, but are there any other factors? Maybe keyword ranking too?
Anybody with more experience in the matter is welcome to share
Yes, I know, but the problem is before reaching that first 1m downloads :)) That’s what most of us are struggling with. If you have any advice for us newbies, we welcome it
You can simply search on google for: “your app name” site:play.google.com
The result gives you all the apps where you appeared once. Often you aren’t in the list anymore, because your app already ranked down. This mostly happens when your downloads already decreased.
Searching this on Google “your app name” site:play.google.com returns the search results that Goole Play gives you when searching for “your app name”, at some point in time. What does that have to do with similar list?
It also returns apps from a different category which could never be on my game’s similar list.
It is as you said. When your app name appears in the similar list it is part of this website and you know where you are or where were in a similar list. This method is working fine for me. I found about 30 apps this way where we are displayed as similar right now.
There is no foolproof %100 way since google updates it algrorythym often. My best advice is
Target a country were you can reach a top rank.
Get to the top , you will be featured in trending list and new free in your category.
If your game or app is good enough it will stick to a high position for a while and maybe rank in other countries a well.
I would suggest it doesn’t matter what type of game or app but whats included. For example if you make a runner type game do this
Have coins to collect and random enemies
Have a in game store to buy power-ups for runs.
Don’t make the game too hard , remember most are casual gamers.
Have 2-3 characters to unlock or choose from.
Basically give the player reason’s or tasks to keep comming back to the game. Plus don’t be afraid to have banners ADs running on the top or bottom of your screen during gameplay. You will make profit that way.
I tried to rank several apps using inc installs, results were bad, even with high retention inc installs. There is one way to use INC install wisely and is targeting concrete countries/category to see in which one you rank higher , later when you get the results you can localize the app before publish, but again if you use inc installs probably you will fail as the algorithm take active installs as one of the main factors
Stay away from buying downloads if your retention rate and ARPU aren’t high enough. It’s just hurting your downloads in the long run since you completely disturb the flow of the store algorithm and probably avoid that your app will be listed as similar app anywhere. Buying downloads is something for social games that earn at least 50cents per download.
