App$ = $$$$$ - Part 2

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You think professional "aso companies" actually add value? I can't imagine they can do anything that a few hours on aso tools couldn't?

They also going to use same aso tools, but if you are new and dont have enough time to play with aso tools, best bet is outsource.
 
$5k - $10k definetly not an good budget with racing games, but its still decent budget to acquire installs + revenue.

First Month:

1. Spend atleast $500 for aso, recruit decent aso company who know what they are doing. This should be done before launch. Search in google and you will find good aso professionals.

2. Don't do any promotions (buying installs) other than aso, buying reviews, press release. Aso process lasts for one month because aso firm should provide you second set of kws, new title and desc after 14 days. So in a month you will be updating kws accordingly.

3. submit your app to app review sites, 70% of the sites will not post your app, but still give it a try.

4. Spamming the gaming forums. yes, hire some guys from DP and ask them to post in major gaming/app forums about your app.


Second Month:

1. Continue your aso. (perfect aso takes maximum 3 months to find perfect kws and title.)

2. Start buying installs from FB, as it is cheap. Combining with your kws, your app will be boosted well). If your budget is $2000 for app installs, dont spend $100 per day, do it all at once. More installs in a day will move your app to Top 10 in your game category. When you hit top 10, you get natural installs, where your app remains there.

3. Buy reviews and ratings from micro workers.

If your game is multiplayer version, add some incentives like $25 amazon gift card per week for who achieves leader board points. This brings you more IAP revenue.

If you can pm me your game in detail, i can suggest you few more things.

Good luck.

This is very helpful info, thanks for the details. I believe you have already saved me a lot of trial and error headache, I will PM you on the further details.
 
Great thread. Thanks!
I always wanted to make an android app but i don't know anything about coding and programming I just want to make something simple: an application giving some tips about a niche. It's basically just some text and maybe some images. Do you know if i can make that without any knowledges? Any advices?
 
Thanks for the input. There are a few variances as I definitely wasn't expecting a profit in that amount of time just to test the market and see what results I'm getting as if I dump 10k into marketing and everyone says your game sucks I should obviously cut my losses. However, if the results are good then the marketing budget needs to be increased. I'm originally going to have less than 20 cars and only 15 places to race so I'm hoping it's enough to keep the users racing as I will immediately be working on additional cars and levels if things are looking positive. From what you say though I still need to expect to use that over a shorter period of time and to plan a budget increase much faster than I had hoped so I'll need to arrange that before I even get started.

Correct. If you knew your Average Revenue Per User, then you would know how much to spend per install to break even or make a profit. Remember, most games can rarely boast high enough ARPU's to afford what it costs to buy users in volume.

You can buy users like BigBuddy says for cheap on Facebook, but the volume is limited because the higher you go, the more you have to spend. Which is why these big games throw a shit ton of cash around to get all the volume for themselves.

Like BigBuddy says, you're better off setting aside money for ASO, tracking it and also money for getting your games reviews, then what's left you either divide between further development (updates) and buying installs. But you need to spend it all in one day, not in 2 or 3 or more... If you had $50-100k+ this would be a different story. But with like $6-7k you can reach the top 50 overall games in the US for like a day or 2, and also top 10 in the racing category. Use this visibility to get organic downloads and track all your metrics.

If it turns out you only earn like $0.15-20 per user, then you have a long way to go to be able to buy traffic profitably in large volumes.

You want to buy all the installs for the US only, not worldwide, or you wont rank in the top anything if you divide your cash between all countries. Each store ranks individually based on downloads/reviews.

Dividing your cash into a longer period would just mean less downloads and no visibility. And if your game doesn't even make enough per user, then the ROI is not going to be great. The idea behind spending it all in one day is that you hope to receive a large influx of organic users. Also, spending in one day like this and reaching the top charts usually means that when your games drops out of the charts it will drop to a larger downloads per day than if you didn't do a burst campaign, and you'll have better rankings for your keywords.

Hope this helps!
 
Just finished reading part 1 and your replies in part 1..Thanks for the part 2)) and helping us make $

bookmarked this too..thanks for the awesome share
 
Another masterstroke by BB. Simply speechless. May Allah Bless you man!
 
Correct. If you knew your Average Revenue Per User, then you would know how much to spend per install to break even or make a profit. Remember, most games can rarely boast high enough ARPU's to afford what it costs to buy users in volume.

You can buy users like BigBuddy says for cheap on Facebook, but the volume is limited because the higher you go, the more you have to spend. Which is why these big games throw a shit ton of cash around to get all the volume for themselves.

Like BigBuddy says, you're better off setting aside money for ASO, tracking it and also money for getting your games reviews, then what's left you either divide between further development (updates) and buying installs. But you need to spend it all in one day, not in 2 or 3 or more... If you had $50-100k+ this would be a different story. But with like $6-7k you can reach the top 50 overall games in the US for like a day or 2, and also top 10 in the racing category. Use this visibility to get organic downloads and track all your metrics.

If it turns out you only earn like $0.15-20 per user, then you have a long way to go to be able to buy traffic profitably in large volumes.

You want to buy all the installs for the US only, not worldwide, or you wont rank in the top anything if you divide your cash between all countries. Each store ranks individually based on downloads/reviews.

Dividing your cash into a longer period would just mean less downloads and no visibility. And if your game doesn't even make enough per user, then the ROI is not going to be great. The idea behind spending it all in one day is that you hope to receive a large influx of organic users. Also, spending in one day like this and reaching the top charts usually means that when your games drops out of the charts it will drop to a larger downloads per day than if you didn't do a burst campaign, and you'll have better rankings for your keywords.

Hope this helps!

That's great stuff man, seriously appreciate it. These last couple posts from yourself and bigbuddy have completely changed my gameplan and probably saved me countless amount of time and wasted money.
 
Also, I'm going to research ASO firms but do either of you have anyone specific off the top of your head that you recommend I check out as well?
 
Also, I'm going to research ASO firms but do either of you have anyone specific off the top of your head that you recommend I check out as well?

None, I taught myself.

Best way to do research is how you do SEO. Use the google keyword tool to find out volume for keywords, and then if you find good keywords, use sensortower to find out the competition. Go for keywords with like 100-200 or less competitors. You can easily beat them out, unless the top 10 for those keywords are all aged games with a ton of reviews. If that's the case forget it. But if only the top 3-5 are good, and the rest are weak and constantly changing, then go for it :)
 
really really want to give this a go, just having issues finding a game to reskin. They all seem to be copies of super popular games, and I thought the idea was to find something that hasnt already exploded with popularity
 
By the way, BIGB the screenshot you shared, Which network is this?
 
I have a decently large iOS app development project (3-4 apps),

It was my understanding that a good flow of installs coming in right after launching the app was very a good way to boost rankings in the store.

The app I am creating is not a game and competition is fairly low.

When is the proper time to pour the budget into installs? I don't think it will be too tough to rank for most of my KWS, so I'm not sure if a 1 day install dump would be the way to go for my app.

I plan to launch each app in waves as i start with the app which is least robust for general traffic driving purposes. I try to select low comp kws with decent traffic and rank within the top 10 for each. Over time, with more reviews and installs from that traffic, it will be easier to rank for higher comp kws right off the bat. Is my understanding and strategy correct?

Thanks in advance for any input,
 
Long term rankings is not something that works with iOS unless you have a really good viral loop inside your apps or you're pouring in paid user acquisition daily. That or a good amount of people converting into reviews too. You need to work out what amount of downloads allows you to hit the top 10 for your category and in the country you want (US / China are the hardest). And using that burst solidify the results by smashing reviews at a ratio of 1 for every 100-200 downloads.

With iOS, it's all about how well your app did when it launched in the first 7-14 days. You can make it do better in future but the same will be required then as was required on launch. An influx of downloads and reviews.

The way the App Store is designed, unless you manage to do huge volume in terms of downloads and reviews in the beginning (by huge I mean in comparison to an app that does average in that category), apps that come out and are newer are going to be given preference over you after a while. Just the way it is.

This is not the same with Android.

So focus on that 7-14 day window (day 1 being the MOST important), and make sure you have your data dialled in so you can make sure your app uses those initial burst of downloads effectively to help its future rankings.

I have a decently large iOS app development project (3-4 apps),

It was my understanding that a good flow of installs coming in right after launching the app was very a good way to boost rankings in the store.

The app I am creating is not a game and competition is fairly low.

When is the proper time to pour the budget into installs? I don't think it will be too tough to rank for most of my KWS, so I'm not sure if a 1 day install dump would be the way to go for my app.

I plan to launch each app in waves as i start with the app which is least robust for general traffic driving purposes. I try to select low comp kws with decent traffic and rank within the top 10 for each. Over time, with more reviews and installs from that traffic, it will be easier to rank for higher comp kws right off the bat. Is my understanding and strategy correct?

Thanks in advance for any input,
 
Thanks for that info, I try not to build any app that would fall into or be used as a "Fad" kind of app like games. The app is designed to maintain a long term userbase.
 
so you are saying if Im gonna get an app to reskin, and then use FB ads to drive downloads. It doesnt matter if the initial game was popular, it just matters that it is reskined and Im getting installs? I just dont want to reskin a really popular game if Im going to need to rank it, and thats going to be impossible.
 
so you are saying if Im gonna get an app to reskin, and then use FB ads to drive downloads. It doesnt matter if the initial game was popular, it just matters that it is reskined and Im getting installs? I just dont want to reskin a really popular game if Im going to need to rank it, and thats going to be impossible.

If you don't rank ANY game, not just reskins, then where do you expect installs to come from?

A lot of mobile developers neglect the understanding of where exactly their installs come from. They just assume Apple is doing its job and they are magically coming. This is not the case.

Your downloads after a 7-14 day period if it drops out of the charts will 100% be coming from keyword searches in the app store or sites that crawled your app and are listing it.
 
Amazing tutorial! I read the first part and launched a really simple Android app about a week ago, I'm monetizing it with Admob banner and interstitial. After reading this article, I opened my Admob account and found my simple app making $2 per day, which is great because I'm not even promoting that app at all. Bought the source code for $15 I think, and this app already made more than that in just a week without me doing anything.
 
I guess it would be helpful to have some discussion about what are some good tactics for ad placement, when to show ads, how many ads to show, not annoying the user, and getting conversions.

Perhaps someone could shed some light on this. Is there a good way to get people do download the ads shown?
 
I just started in app business and pretty newbie about that. Thank you BB for the good information.

Some questions to Lookzor if you have time to answer. You said like this:
1. Long term rankings is not something that works with iOS unless you have a really good viral loop inside your apps or you're pouring in paid user acquisition daily.

Question - Is it possible to make payment process in iOS and Android something like this, using application where are 5 different payment options for my service:
1. Free
2. $1 for adding/connecting other smartphone.
3. +$1 for adding/connecting other smartphone.
4. +$1 for adding/connecting other smartphone.
5. +$1 for adding/connecting other smartphone.

If you understand what I meant :)


2. With iOS, it's all about how well your app did when it launched in the first 7-14 days.
So focus on that 7-14 day window (day 1 being the MOST important)

Question - I am from EU and planning to market only in USA. Is it true that if I don't have US iOS dev. account, then I have to wait 48 hours or more after launch...meaning that I will lose the most important 1-2 days?


P.S. I wanted to add rep. to both of you but seems this button have been disappeared from BHW :)
 
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