Advertise Your Mobile App with App Campaigns

 As an Android developer you know by now that when you finish working on your app and get it published on Google Play the other half of work just starts, the work you like less: marketing. However this is an important part that influences the popularity of your app. If you rely solely on submitting apps to Google Play alone, you’re doing a mistake. You should submit your app to as many Android review sites as possible. Think about how much android app promotion do you get by default from Google Play when you publish an app and you’ll see that they don’t do much. With close to a million apps now published in the playstore it would be difficult for them to promote new ones. Right now here’s how android ratings on Google Play:

They show the lucky 5 most popular apps on the homepage and if as an user you have the curiosity to check the popular ones per category or ‘All Top Paid Apps’ you’ll get 20 pages with 24 apps on them so a total of 480*3 apps that get promoted this way. Then there’s also the Top New Paid and Top New Free lists that will show the same amount of apps but added recently (most likely if your app gets some steam this is where it could be shown). All in all with the top charts there are 5 lists of 480 apps so 2400 listings.

Now, there aren’t many popular Android review sites, but for sure all of the most popular ones are included in the list I gathered below. As of right now there are 168 Android sites in this list, and since it is work-in-progress if you know of a new website or have anything to add regarding the sites already present please leave a comment and help us improve it 

Then there’s the list of apps their own staff decides to promote, but in total there are around 100 apps promoted this way.

Here they show 240 apps and games that are rising in popularity, much like the Top new free/paid but even less popular then those. As a logged in user you get to receive some app recommendations as well, but those are just 24 apps.

For each listing in the playstore Google will show the user additional related games and apps. Like it wasn’t difficult enough to promote your app, now they show your visitors your most popular competitors as well. Luckily there aren’t many listings shown this way, but chances are your app is listed this way somewhere too. Considering that the prominent listings mentioned above account for a total of 2764 apps and given that there are usually 8 recommendations, we’ll place the possible related apps/games listings that could get visibility to 22112.

So that’s it, they basically promote 25,000 apps in total, with 20% of those apps receiving the most exposure because no one will scroll to the 20th page of the Top apps. Sure, there’s the search option as well but having your app shown in the first few listings is closely related on how well you’ve optimized your playstore listing. In the recent keynote they’ve disclosed that there are 6 million unique searches per month, so about 200,000 searches daily.

Out of those, let’s assume that 20% of the searches are popular enough to see some traffic your way if you’re optimized. That means about 40,000 apps/games will be installed daily and receive visibility this way. Summing it all up they promote 65,000 apps (roughly) out of 1 million. That’s a little over 6% and again this is a very optimistic approximation given that I didn’t exclude duplicates. But anyway, would you rely solely on the act of god that will push your app in those lucky 6%?

You shouldn’t. You have to do anything in your power to promote your Android app and market it to your best knowledge. One of the recommendations is to submit your app to as many review sites as you can. All of them if possible. This way you can do something to increase the popularity of your app.