Prepare in advance and you'll get better results. It's a rule of thumb that works in absolutely all areas, and marketing for online apps is no exception.
I've collected answers to the most common questions I hear from clients about organic and paid advertising for mobile apps, optimization of advertising budgets, and mobile analytics. I hope they will help you better understand where to start and what indicators are especially important to pay attention to.
There are two types of results: search and category. For mobile app marketers, the former is more important, because search is chosen by those users who already have a query and are looking for offers based on keywords, if not a specific app.
Let's imagine that a user searches for an app using the query "online store". Usually, they do not scroll far down the page, because the top of the search results already offers the most relevant results. Then the user will either immediately download the app they like the most or compare several before making a choice.
The higher the app's position in the top, the greater the share of downloads it receives. The top 5 or top 10 apps by search can share the number of downloads proportionally - from the largest to the smallest share.
The app also has an option to get to the top of the search results by category. It is chosen when an app is first published.
When a user doesn't have a specific query but wants to explore a certain group of apps, they look for them in a category. It is not easy to get to the top of the search results in this case. The ranking is formed by the number of downloads and other product factors: app quality, user ratings, positive reviews, and others.
Of course, it's better to work with both organic promotion and paid tools - they really complement each other, and sometimes they even bring unexpected results, which we have already seen in several projects. But each case is individual.
For example, in the American market, marketplace search is very common, so there is a great potential for working with organic search. In other countries this story might beless developed. In this case users are more likely to find out about an app through advertising or recommendations.
Our task as mobile specialists is to bring in new users or retain old ones. When formulating a promotion plan, we start from the client's vision and make recommendations that best suit the request and budget.
If there is traffic and requests from users in the client's niche in organic search, we will definitely suggest working with ASO. Even if you have a limited amount of search traffic in your search engine, you should work on the visual components of ASO to maintain a high conversion rate. If you have a limited budget, you should prioritize paid channels. They make it easier to predict the result based on historical data or category benchmarks, so the client gets clear metrics.
Yes, it can depend on the number of installs, but more often it is related to the desired volume of installs. Let's imagine that you start buying traffic in large volumes because you have a goal to become a category leader. To take back the position from a competitor, you need to increase your budget, but you won't be able to go beyond the possible number of users.
Your CPA will increase not because the ad is shown to more people, but because the ad is shown more often.
This applies to large advertising budgets if you need to reach 100,000 installs or more in a short period of time. In this case, they will cost more than if we had several months to reach the goal. This also works in the opposite case - with small purchase volumes, you can get a lower price per user acquisition.
The marketplaces can index your app using various keywords. The App Store and Google Play use tags placed in the metadata, so you need to keep an eye out for updates to competitors' metadata, among other things, to maintain conversion rates in your category.
Search Visibility indicates how easy it is for a user to find an app in the search results. The higher the number of indexed queries that are in the top, the higher this indicator is.
It is also important that the user searches for you not only by brand query, but also by other tags in your category. The indexed queries may even include branded queries of competitors, which is a good indicator. It means that the user chose you when searching for an app by a specific name. In the App Store, for instance, you can add your competitors' tags to your keywords - users don't see them, but they affect the overall indexation. Google Play Market doesn't have this feature, so you need to work with other app optimization tools.
There are certain user differences between Android and iOS users that can be traced in analytics. For example, the way iOS users search - iOS users tend to search for a specific app, while Android users search for general queries by type: "store", "clothes", etc.
Advertising for iOS app users is more expensive due to the peculiarities of attribution and tracking of user interaction with advertising content. Advertising platforms spend a lot of effort to find a relevant iOS user. But from experience, I can say that quite often they generate higher quality traffic and have higher purchasing power.
The effectiveness of in-app advertising is influenced by many factors. Even within the same niche and country, different tools produce different results for different products - it depends on budgets, client goals, application features, etc.
To focus on a particular market, an app must first collect initial traffic and data that can be analyzed later.
For example, an iOS user is more expensive and generates more revenue, while an Android user, on the contrary, is much cheaper but generates less revenue. This does not mean that advertising to one particular market will be effective - in terms of cost-effectiveness, they are potentially at about the same level. And this is important to understand when developing a promotion strategy.
Even if customers have a high level of brand awareness, they may not be aware of a specific product, and even fewer of them are buyers. Targeting custom audiences and customer lists is the most expensive type of launch in paid traffic. Therefore, the best option for launching a paid campaign is to start with a wide audience of potential customers. This way, you will build up interest in the product at the initial stage.
It will be cheaper to get an install from a new customer than from one who has already tried the product.
Install campaigns help you reach the largest number of users at the best price. This allows you to track the behavior of these users and understand from which source they come most effectively, where they convert to sales better, or where installs or targeted actions are cheaper. This funnel can then be narrowed down closer to the final goal - to move on to sales, work on ROI and profit, and at one stage, be sure to work with remarketing.
With free analytics systems such as Google Analytics 4 and Firebase, we can evaluate traffic transparently only for ads that we run on Google Ads for Android apps. If we plan to run paid ads from any other traffic sources - Facebook, Instagram, Apple Search Ads, TikTok, and for iOS users - we will additionally need a paid analytics system.
The most popular solutions are Appsflyer and Adjust - they identify user information (device type, operating system, browser, referral source, etc.) and track their path through the funnel. In particular, the system records the advertiser that helped to make the installation happen, which is important when several advertising sources are launched simultaneously.
The obtained metrics allow analysts and mobile specialists to understand which channel attracts relevant traffic, gives better conversion to targeted events and retention, and where the user is cheaper. After that, you can make decisions on the effective allocation of the advertising budget and optimization of the sales funnel.
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