Apps are extremely popular as I’m sure you’re aware and they can help you with anything from playing the next extremely addictive game (Fortnite, is that you?) or helping maintain a healthy lifestyle by monitoring your food intake using only an app.
There’s an app for just about everything.
However, apps are extremely big projects for most and it takes a lot of time and energy to create, so much so that often the way that an app is going to be marketed is put to the back of the developers’ minds.
The exact thing that makes apps so in demand is the same thing that makes it difficult for your app to succeed – there’s an app for almost anything and often there are multiple apps for the same thing.
Of course, the success of an app owes majorly to the quality and development of the app itself, but a “lesser” quality of app could outperform a “better” app by ensuring that their online marketing campaigns are providing them with the most visibility.
An app needs not only to drive people to download it but also to capture their regular engagement (around 75% of app downloads are only used once).
How we can promote app installs / in-app conversions
Google has recently released a new campaign platform for promoting ads called Universal app campaigns which simplifies the whole process of promoting your app. As advertisers, we don’t have too much input on the design of these types of campaigns. Instead, Google uses the apps store listing and some text ideas we provide to automatically create (and dynamically amend) ads that Google perceives to be the most relevant for your campaign/app at that time.
Googles reason for changing from the old style of ads was, in part, that mobile provided so many signals that it was practically impossible for account managers to make the correct changes, in real time, based on statistical fact.
The new streamlined campaigns maximise the use of machine learning to try and drive app engagement / installs at the ideal time using all of the mobile signals that Google gathers in real time.
Ultimately, universal app campaigns are great at giving the underdog a simpler way of managing what used to be relatively large amounts of data/targeting options into a more condensed solution.
As Google continues to improve the reporting and measuring side of these campaigns they will no doubt grow in terms of usability and the reporting fixtures.
