How to promote apps: the strategies you absolutely need to know

Like it or not, apps have become a daily standard for businesses and consumers alike. There’s an app for everything, whether it’s for shopping, banking, traveling, or gaming. In fact, a recent survey found that 88% of mobile time is spent within apps.

According to Statista data from Q2 2022, there are more than six million apps across the Google Playstore, Apple App Store, and Amazon Store. This is why properly marketing your app has never been more important and has become an integral part of a company’s marketing strategy. But to be effective, app marketing needs to take into account the entire ecosystem that impacts your app’s marketing performance. Whether it’s app store optimization (ASO) or the combination of organic and paid user acquisition (e.g., through Google app campaigns and Apple Search Ads), marketers need to look at data holistically and ask the right questions when examining an app’s performance.

Organic growth alone isn’t enough

While a few years ago ASO might have been the most important part of your app marketing strategy, to remain competitive in the fast-paced app marketing landscape, you need to supercharge your user acquisition (UA) strategy. This doesn’t mean ASO isn’t important anymore – it certainly is – but it needs to be combined with your paid user acquisition strategy for sustainable app growth. Both organic and paid UA have the main goal of driving quality conversions while maintaining a low cost per conversion.

To start, you need a solid ASO foundation to maintain a stream of high-quality users through the channels. It’s essential as the user will eventually land on your app store page. You are literally wasting your money if you have not invested time into ASO and optimized your store listing.

Paid user acquisition can lead to more organic app installs. Ads will draw new attention to your app store page. The more installs your app gets, the higher your app will rank in the app stores. As a result, visibility in search results and browse sections increases. Due to the increased visibility, more users will land on your organic store page and download your app. Then the growth cycle continues!

A successful strategy is understanding the correlation between ASO and paid user acquisition efforts. You need to understand how your paid funnel impacts your organic growth and vice versa. At GAMEE, we utilized the all-in-one platform from App Radar which helped our team work together within a single system and understand, as well as maximize, the impact of both organic and paid user acquisition for both the Google and Apple app stores.

Analyzing app performance

After putting in a lot of effort to optimize your UA, don’t just sit back and hope to see perfect results. During the campaign, you should be analyzing your app’s performance and asking the right questions. You’d likely want to know how much growth your ASO efforts have brought about. Or was it your paid UA traffic that determined an increase or decrease? It can be difficult to answer all these questions, especially considering many factors that can play a significant role. For example, let’s take a look at a couple of scenarios.

Scenario one: A drop in app installs

Seeing a drop in installs? It might be worrying at first glance. However, the good news is that there’s most likely an explanation for every decrease in installs. And for every problem, there is also a solution.

A crucial impact factor you need to consider is your paid user acquisition efforts. When you notice a decrease in downloads, you should first check whether you ran ads during that specific period. Ads can bring a substantial amount of traffic to your app, and once you stop or reduce them, it could have a substantial effect on your results. Check the correlation between organic and paid conversions, then analyze how paid conversions impact total growth and find out if an increase in installs could be due to reduced activity through paid channels.

What should you do now?

First, try to get a better picture of the situation by looking at the last 30 or 90 days and understanding how significant the impact was. If, for example, pausing your Google app campaigns significantly dropped your installs, you should consider turning the ads back on.

Scenario two: An increase in app installs

This is the outcome we all aim for. Ideally, you’d want this to continue during and beyond your marketing campaign. But for that, you need to know what impacted the increase. Transferring and attributing success from one place to another can be tricky if you don’t know where the success came from.

The best solution would be to look at the breakdown of conversions to help you find the answer. Is it Google Ads, Apple Search Ads, another paid channel, or ASO? If you run a campaign through a paid channel at the same time that installs increased, it’s highly likely that it was the driver behind your app’s overall growth. It’s also worth evaluating which ad platform is the most efficient. Are you getting a better cost per conversion from one paid channel? To get a sense of how well your app is performing, we recommend comparing data against previous campaigns: how did impressions, conversions, and costs perform compared to the previous period? Taking all of this into consideration will help you determine if you should shift your focus or make changes to your campaign.

What you shouldn’t stop doing

There are three elements that every app marketer should never stop working on:

ASO

It’s the final destination for all app activities. Every dollar and hour invested elsewhere can be multiplied by a good ASO strategy and approach. It is here where our use of App Radar’s platform has been extremely valuable in maximizing our campaigns.

Test

Utilize personalized app store lists (wherever possible), various paid ad network combinations, and app store A/B tests to achieve the best results.

Prioritize

Choose the audience, markets, regions, and/or demographics you need to win with, and focus your ASO and paid channels on them.

While analyzing the impact of paid and organic user acquisition isn’t an easy task, the one thing you do not want to do is put all your eggs in one basket. You can’t rely solely on organic UA or solely on paid UA. For a successful app marketing strategy, both areas need to work in tandem. Your campaign should also leave room for testing. This allows you to adjust and pivot your strategy as you go and adapt it to your target audience. Trust me, when managed correctly your app will soon reap the rewards of your strategy.

Source Search Engine Watch