Tips on Marketing New Apps on Google Play, And get App Rating and Review
So this month I released my first two apps on the Google Play store and I made a few mistakes and learned along the way, I also have become very confused by the differences in popularity of the two apps and I am not exactly sure why they were as different as they were. I'll post my experience below and also make some suggestions. Please post your thoughts, lessons you've learned and advice below.Both apps were educational apps marked as paid, the lowest price that Google Play would let me set was about 1 US dollar.
I got a few sales, probably from friends of my sister who is a software engineer and has many developer friends and posted the app on Facebook. Nothing that would make me rich or even to buy a drink at a cafe, but it was something and it made me smile. I created a sale where it was temporarily free for a weekend and out of nowhere I got about 400 downloads. I was surprised, happy, I got a few 5 star Rating and Reviews. There was nothing special about this app as far as search was concerned, no special keywords etc. I thought it perhaps every release would be this way during a sale. There were no further purchases since the sale ended. Not sure why I got lucky this first time during the sale, I was hoping that the same would happen for my second app, but as you will see, it definitely did not. Still have some marketing ideas, we'll see what happens.
App #2: I put a bit more effort into. More difficult to create. Educational and Christmas themed. Less successful. It struggled to get any downloads. I created a weekend sale and got about 10 downloads, even with quite a bit of effort. One difference was the first game was published on a Sunday and then the sale started the next week on Friday. For the second app it was released on a Friday and then the sale was the next day. Perhaps it was something to do with how long the game was up and the few purchases it had received? This might have affected search. The second app also had an issue with the url (com.domain.blahblahblah becomes your URL - you cannot change this after release so be careful when naming it). I relaunched my game because of this and lost the few reviews and downloads that I had. I had to work hard to get those reviews too, so that was a pity.
Online there are a lot of sites and groups that do review exchanges. Which will provide a real mobile Reviews and Rating for the app which help your app on ranking on Google Play. So you must to join the Website like Reviewlancer, review Motion, install4install etc.
I have now just discovered that you cannot create a sale price within 30 days of your last sale. I've also read that apps that are not educational cannot even do such sales. Let me know if this is true in your experience.The Google Play Developers console also only updates its analytics once every 24 hours during weekdays and it is even slower during weekends. You cannot track downloads and reviews in real time. It also gives you very limited knowledge of how your customers found your app. Others suggest using alternatives to Google play analytics but that may require adding something to your APK and I have a suspicion that it might also affect your privacy policy. There is a lot of talk online about Android Search Optimization (using keywords etc) I can remember I used to do something similar many years ago when I did some stuff with Google Ad-words, but to be honest I need a bit of a refresher.
I got a few sales, probably from friends of my sister who is a software engineer and has many developer friends and posted the app on Facebook. Nothing that would make me rich or even to buy a drink at a cafe, but it was something and it made me smile. I created a sale where it was temporarily free for a weekend and out of nowhere I got about 400 downloads. I was surprised, happy, I got a few 5 star Rating and Reviews. There was nothing special about this app as far as search was concerned, no special keywords etc. I thought it perhaps every release would be this way during a sale. There were no further purchases since the sale ended. Not sure why I got lucky this first time during the sale, I was hoping that the same would happen for my second app, but as you will see, it definitely did not. Still have some marketing ideas, we'll see what happens.
App #2: I put a bit more effort into. More difficult to create. Educational and Christmas themed. Less successful. It struggled to get any downloads. I created a weekend sale and got about 10 downloads, even with quite a bit of effort. One difference was the first game was published on a Sunday and then the sale started the next week on Friday. For the second app it was released on a Friday and then the sale was the next day. Perhaps it was something to do with how long the game was up and the few purchases it had received? This might have affected search. The second app also had an issue with the url (com.domain.blahblahblah becomes your URL - you cannot change this after release so be careful when naming it). I relaunched my game because of this and lost the few reviews and downloads that I had. I had to work hard to get those reviews too, so that was a pity.
Online there are a lot of sites and groups that do review exchanges. Which will provide a real mobile Reviews and Rating for the app which help your app on ranking on Google Play. So you must to join the Website like Reviewlancer, review Motion, install4install etc.
I have now just discovered that you cannot create a sale price within 30 days of your last sale. I've also read that apps that are not educational cannot even do such sales. Let me know if this is true in your experience.The Google Play Developers console also only updates its analytics once every 24 hours during weekdays and it is even slower during weekends. You cannot track downloads and reviews in real time. It also gives you very limited knowledge of how your customers found your app. Others suggest using alternatives to Google play analytics but that may require adding something to your APK and I have a suspicion that it might also affect your privacy policy. There is a lot of talk online about Android Search Optimization (using keywords etc) I can remember I used to do something similar many years ago when I did some stuff with Google Ad-words, but to be honest I need a bit of a refresher.
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