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We spent $20k on Google Play pre-registration ads

andreaskambanis.com

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Re: We spent $20k on Google Play pre-registration ads

#71

Post by munk-a »

Firmwarrior wrote: post #28
for_i_in_range wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And we threw $20k in ad spend at it (which quite frankly is insane).

Seems like at this point you'd come out ahead if you just mailed people 2 dollar bills with the promise of another 2 dollar bill if they install your app

Honestly, there's a lot of advertising out there that I think could benefit from direct monetary incentives. A large portion of the population is becoming resistant to regular advertising (good for them) and opting in to ad blockers when available. Actually paying people for the attention you're demanding from them would be refreshingly different... and heck, it worked for timeshares.

Re: We spent $20k on Google Play pre-registration ads

#72

Post by rcme »

aantix wrote: post #70
l5870uoo9y wrote: post #42

> MealPrepPro is built by a small indie dev team and $20k was a painful amount of money for us to waste. With pre-registration ads you're putting all your faith in Google that they'll deliver the conversions they're showing in the ads reports I am running a small independent startup myself where I count every nickel and dime. I tried Google Ads (there was an offer to spend $400 to get an additional $400). Besides a f…

Just thinking out loud - is there any way to create a profitable Google Ad campaign without sinking thousands of money ramping up and learning? It doesn't appear so.

I haven't fully validated this idea yet, but I ran a Google ad campaign for $5 a day for a mailing list signup page that I was planning a business around. Click through rates were around 2.5%, which seems to be the baseline, i.e. a 2.5% click through rate basically means no engagement. One thing that was interesting, however, is that certain keywords had click through rates around 7%. I wanted to try re-targeting the campaign to just those keywords but I lost motivation.

Re: We spent $20k on Google Play pre-registration ads

#73

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

paxys wrote: post #36
Farbklex wrote: post #12

Neat article. I would like to criticize your landing page for your app. It very very much bugs me, when landing pages for apps have only a QR code which I am supposed to scan with my phone. Luckily, you also added a "Get the App" button. Problem is, that you try to be smart and automatically forward me to either the Google Play Store or Apple App Store. Since I opened the link on a Macbook Pro, you assume I want to s…

How many people out there install smartphone apps from a desktop web browser? You anyways have to pull out the phone to use the app. Having a QR code front and center and navigating to the app store listing on the phone is the preferable outcome for 99% of customers. The majority of them aren't even signed in to Apple/Google on the desktop browser.

I do. But even if I didn't I might just want to see the play store page without jumping through hoops.

Re: We spent $20k on Google Play pre-registration ads

#74

Post by munk-a »

safety1st wrote: post #68
alexb_ wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has such a gigantic incentive to lie about how effective their advertising is. It's impossible to verify and they make more money the more effective they say it is. So it's something I've suspected is happening for a long time. The question then becomes, what does the internet look like if advertisers only spent 10% of what they do now? How much of the internet is built on the lie that digital advertising work…

In 1995 the Internet existed, it was basically great, and basically no website was ad funded. I cannot think of a single essential service I use on the Internet today which is ad funded. If it's essential I'm paying for it because the free, ad-funded version is shitty and unreliable. We could ban Internet advertising tomorrow (give people time to migrate to paid services) and I genuinely don't think it would have muc…

I'd also add that personally motivated hosting is basically what gets small sites through the day. I worked on a MUD for quite a while where a small portion of the playerbase was working professionals and the majority of the playerbase was broke college students with far too much free time. The working folks would shell out a completely inconsequential 30 dollars a month between ten of them just so they could have fun playing the game - there was never any serious discussion of adding a paid requirement to join because 3$/month is very little for a steady stream of entertainment and because the "leeches" actually contributed immensely to the activity in the MUD. The workings folks contributed money, the college folks contributed time and everyone had fun.

If you're an independent reporter running a blog you can easily cover the hosting costs by just writing an occasional article for a major organization. If you have a fun hobby that hobby is probably worth the cost of hosting a server to attract other hobbiests.

Really, the only thing that would possibly die forever might be services like YouTube which have absolutely absurdly weak monetization potentials when compared to their infrastructure costs. Losing YouTube would suck, but if it meant I'd never need to see another internet ad I think the cost is worth it... and more curated services like Nebula have proven that purely subscriber funded video content can work - but it'd be hard to enter that market with no free hosting platform like YouTube.

Re: We spent $20k on Google Play pre-registration ads

#75

Post by f5e4 »

flokie wrote: post #16

It seems pretty clear that's what you get when you use the campaign? https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ... "After you make an app or game available for pre-registration, users can visit your store listing to learn about and pre-register for your new app or game. Then, when you publish your app or game later, all pre-registered users will receive a push notification from Google Play to instal…

I don't know anything about app releases, and I'm sure something like this is important to get an app into trending lists.

However I'm a bit skeptical that auto-downloads would even really be better for a free app. If the user isn't willing to accept a notification to install an app, they probably aren't going to use the app if it just auto-downloaded.

Also this just seems like a very weird app to have pre-registration ads for. If a user is looking for a "meal planner" app they obviously aren't going to just wait 2.5 months for your app (which doesn't seem particularly unique) to come out. They're going to download and try other apps that are actually available during that time.

It still seems like a rip-off though.

Re: We spent $20k on Google Play pre-registration ads

#76

Post by mrguyorama »

Firmwarrior wrote: post #28
for_i_in_range wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And we threw $20k in ad spend at it (which quite frankly is insane).

Seems like at this point you'd come out ahead if you just mailed people 2 dollar bills with the promise of another 2 dollar bill if they install your app

Indeed there are groups and "businesses" that "pay" you to install apps. I assume someone is on the other side of that transaction paying for new user installs. Doing it yourself would probably be cheaper and you would probably be offering a much higher payout than those systems.

Re: We spent $20k on Google Play pre-registration ads

#77

Post by itake »

aantix wrote: post #70
l5870uoo9y wrote: post #42

> MealPrepPro is built by a small indie dev team and $20k was a painful amount of money for us to waste. With pre-registration ads you're putting all your faith in Google that they'll deliver the conversions they're showing in the ads reports I am running a small independent startup myself where I count every nickel and dime. I tried Google Ads (there was an offer to spend $400 to get an additional $400). Besides a f…

Just thinking out loud - is there any way to create a profitable Google Ad campaign without sinking thousands of money ramping up and learning? It doesn't appear so.

I think it is possible, but you can't do it on the freemium model, or very aggressive paywalls for premium features.

Re: We spent $20k on Google Play pre-registration ads

#78

Post by andreaskam »

LastTrain wrote: post #45
andreaskam wrote: post #2

Short version: We used a Google Ads pre-registration campaign to get installs for our app. Google charged us for 16,171 conversions. When we launched, we only received 1,371 installs.

What was the time between pre-registration and release?

We started the pre-registration around 2 months before release and it ran right up until release. The max you can do is 90 days.

Re: We spent $20k on Google Play pre-registration ads

#79

Post by mrguyorama »

no_wizard wrote: post #46
simple10 wrote: post #32

Google is notorious for over-reporting ad data for all sorts of reasons. One super important thing to know is conversions could also be landing page views depending on how the ad account is setup. By default, Google will use any type of conversion configured in the ad account for displaying stats in the campaign. It's a bit tricky with Google Ads to configure a specific campaign to only report conversions as app inst…

This seems like it should be a lawsuit waiting to happen. If I was running ad spend through Google and they were giving me inflated reports routinely, its willful on part of the company, and feels like grounds for a lawsuit.

The problem is that it's one of those things that to take it to court, you need some starting proof, but the entire system is designed to be opaque.

Re: We spent $20k on Google Play pre-registration ads

#80

Post by carlosjobim »

alexb_ wrote: post #7
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #4

Not just google ads. Meta ads and reddit ads all fake the metrics and charge more money than what they send you. It's all a scam but because of the larger gun policy nobody can do anything.

Google has such a gigantic incentive to lie about how effective their advertising is. It's impossible to verify and they make more money the more effective they say it is. So it's something I've suspected is happening for a long time. The question then becomes, what does the internet look like if advertisers only spent 10% of what they do now? How much of the internet is built on the lie that digital advertising work…

> It's impossible to verify

Spend on ads is extremely easy to verify. For every ad channel you use a different discount code. Then you see how many customers used a specific discount code when making a purchase. Discount codes work everywhere: Social media, search ads, radio, TV, banners, etc etc

If you don't use discount codes when advertising it means you don't care for how you spend your marketing money - which is the truth for a large majority of businesses. They simply don't care if their advertising works or not.

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