5 things i learned from spending $153k on app Installs

In last 2 years, I have spent over $153k on app install campaigns for me and my clients, and when you are spending close to $10k a month on ads, you have no room to make mistakes.

In my whole app marketing career, I have focused mostly on organic methods to get installs because i personally get the best results with them (got over 12.5 million installs for my own app portfolio) but ruling out paid advertising to increase reach would be a foolish move. Multi-million dollar companies like calm, headspace, cheetah mobile spend millions of dollars on ads every year.

Why do they do that? Because it’s working for them obviously! The users they acquire through these channels end up becoming buyers which eventually pay for their ad costs.

Now 5 things which i learned from spending over $150k in last 2 years

1) Conversion ratio (Cost/conv): This is by far the most important factor that determines everything from cost per install to number of conversions. This should be your OMTM (One metric that matters) while running advertising for user acquisition. ASO, which is discussed later, plays a huge role in optimizing conversion ratio too.

2) Target Audience: Nail down your target audience before you start running ads of any kind. Everything on your app page, from your app icon, app screenshots to app title & description should be laser focused towards this target audience. Find out their pain points and then send a targeted message through your app page.

3) Ad budget: Decide and allocate the ad budget which you want to spend on various advertising channels and then allocate or deallocate the ad budget depending on which channel gives you the best results. You should keep checking your acquisition cost daily to figure out how much budget you should allocate. Allocating more budget when the acquisition cost is low is a really good idea and something what i have done to get thousands of downloads quickly.

4) Campaign timing: Running ads for christmas shopping during summers is not a good idea for obvious reasons thus campaign timing is as important if not more than other factors mentioned here. Also, many times your ad costs will go up when plenty of your competitors are running ads at the same time so its crucial to decide what time you want to run your ad campaigns.

5) App Store Optimization (ASO) : Unlike what most marketeers believe, ASO is not a one time thing, it’s a continuous process of testing, optimizing and seeing what works. You can’t just do ASO one time and expect to magically see your app in top rankings. Before running ads of any kind, do get a professional ASO done to ensure you are able to rank your app for the right keywords.

Now as you can see all these factors are interlinked. You can’t just focus on one and ignore the other. It’s important that you try to work on all the factors if you want the best ROI.

P.S: We have been working on a breakthrough ASO tool for last 1 year which has improved our conversion ratio from 25% to 67% in just 3 months.

Also, We have managed to get 4 million installs in just 3 months after we started using it. Our secret ASO tool is called Storemockups, the only definite ASO tool which can almost 3x your app downloads as well as drastically reduce your user acquisition costs.

For a very short time while storemockups is in beta, it’s available for a ONE-TIME Payment of $999

What you can do with our ASO tool

1. ✅ Create breathtaking Multi million dollar App Mockups,
2. ✅ Reduce advertising costs by using proven high converting templates.
3. ✅ Customise your mockups with over 80 iOS & Android phones and tablets.
4. ✅ Set custom background gradients or set custom image backgrounds.
5. ✅ Add custom objects to your mockups to grab attention and sky rocket conversions.
6. ✅ Format caption & Sub-caption fonts, size and color to send the perfect message to your users.
7. ✅ Save and export mockups in all iOS sizes (coming soon)
8. ✅ Auto-translate your App mockups to different localized languages (coming soon)
9. ✅ Extract keywords used by your competitors (coming soon)
10. ✅ Version control your app store listing over time (coming soon)
11. ✅ Preview App Store/ Google play page with new screenshots and description (coming soon)

We will be ending our lifetime deal on February, till the time our Storemockups is in beta and after that, you can only use the tool with a monthly subscription.

Feel free to follow me or message me on linkedin if you would like to know more about the tool and how to best utilize it!