The best online marketing tools for your app

The best online marketing tools for your app

Beside the free existing ways to promote an app as seen in my previous posts you have the paid ways. If you have money this is the most secure way of getting users. More downloads you get, higher you go on the ranking of the Appstore.

However, don’t start this without knowing how your apps is working. Make first some user tests. Be sure your app has enough engagement. Be sure people will not delete it after a few days. Check you have no bugs or crash. If all the above is satisfactory you can start to pay per downloads or per action in your app.  Don’t forget to have a clear objective. What position do you want to reach? In which category (Games, Social networks, Lifestyle,…? In wich platform? In which country?

If the following tools are efficient for the Apple store, there are not so efficient for Google Play. Google Play uses complex algorithms taking more values than the number of downloads into account.

You actually have four main ways of doing advertising.

Incentivized promotion

Banners of your apps will appear in other apps related with yours with some incentives in order to download yours. So if you have a game called XX for example, someone playing another game will see a banner telling him: download XX and earn 100 free points. Companies like Chartboost and Tapjoy offer this kind of promotion. The price used to be cheaper but the quality of the user will be lower. Many will only download your app for the incentives. The price for this kind of promotion starts with USD 0,10. 

Non-incentivized promotion

This is offered by company like iAD (Apple) or admob (Google) for example. The cost per download used to be higher but the quality of the user as well. The price per downloads is higher than USD 2,00 and go until 6 or 7. Facebook also offers a nice way of promoting your app with an excellent segmentation per type of device, country, sex, marital status, age, etc... However, they work with CPM and not CPI.

Mix of incentivized and non-incentivized

This is offered by company like Fiksu or Flurry. It’s a combination of incentive and non incentivized promotion.

One day promotion

This is a promotion where during one day one paid app is offered for free or a free app will be offered to a user with some benefits. Companies offering this are Appgratis or Free app a day. Please note that in April 2013, Appgratis was excluded from the Apple Store as it was not respecting Apple’s rules.