How to get your mobile game go viral
You’ve put in countless hours developing your game, rock solid screenshots, clever keywords in description, a beautiful icon to match, you even spammed your friends and emailed your relatives to download your new game!
Gameplay is amazing, graphics are top notch, there is nothing like it out there, nothing as good, it must work, it will succeed! It will pay off! Appannie is connected… analytics are in tune, everything is locked and loaded.
You click the Publish button, drumroll, you’re game is out!
Press releases are out! All your friends are excited and asking you about the game, you’re starting to think what you will say when bloggers reach out for an interview! Oh, how intriguing, how exciting!
Few days go by, you’re so anxious to get your first batch of stats in, you haven’t been sleeping! You login to your dashboard, and what do you see? Couple hundred downloads? WTFFFFFFFFF! RAAAAAAAAGE!!!!!!
Like you and many others, this was me when I launched a few of my first games. However, as I kept going and launching title after title, I came upon one very effective strategy which I will try and explain below.
REALITY CHECK. There are over 1 million apps, it almost doesn’t matter how unique yours is, they are all the same in the eyes of consumers! Your game is lost in the sea of free options. You need a massive push to get your app through the charts and in front of people!
But how did Flappy Bird do it? How did Skippy Squirrel manage it? Fit the Fat? 4 tiles? stay in line? don’t touch the spikes? impossible rush? brain rush? And every single mini game out there that ranked out of nowhere, seemingly overnight?
Answer: SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
But, you have a Facebook page already, instagram account, maybe even a snapchat username… and you even tried buying installs from FB… hm, thats all good and all, but I am not talking about THAT kind of marketing.
I am talking about PAID SOCIAL MEDIA, INSTAGRAM SHOUTOUTS from massive accounts. Massive instagram accounts with millions of followers that shoutout your app and get TONS and TONS of INTERESTED users to download it. Why I say interested? Because users don’t have to download anything, they only download if they’re interested in your offer, downloads are not incentivized, nothing is faked, users are real.
Big accounts are expensive! Very expensive! The only way for Instagram account owners to make any reasonable money is to offer shoutouts that expire! 2hr shoutouts, 3 hr shoutouts, and in some cases, even 10min shoutouts! Thats the only way to keep prices reasonable. Besides, the activity on instagram posts dies out after 4hrs-6hrs so it doesn’t matter if the posts are permanent!
Reason you never found any evidence of previously mentioned apps on instagram (or anywhere for that matter) is because by the time they started charting in app stores, the posts were already gone from instagram. Some of these apps are being ran by instagram account owners themselves, and they know this trick all too well!
Here is one of my games I advertised in November of 2014 and some staggering CPI numbers I achieved I can guarantee you, you have never seen such low CPI before!
I already had my app out for a few days in both stores, so it was critical for me to move quickly!
After picking a few accounts (not as easy as you think it would be) that were in line with my game’s audience, I created 3 different images (ads) and started my campaign
Day 1. Nov 5th
Spend: $975
Shoutouts: 7
Exposure: ~13M followers
Range: 2hr to 4hr shoutouts
Downloads: ~6k
Result: ~$0.16 CPI
Day 2. Nov 6th
Spend: $1300
Shoutouts: 11
Exposure: ~13M followers
Range: 2hr to 4hr shoutouts
Downloads: ~5k
Result: ~$0.26 CPI
Day 3. Nov 7th
Spend: $780
Shoutouts: 4
Exposure: ~8M followers
Range: 2hr to 4hr shoutouts
Downloads: ~7.2k
Result: ~$0.11 CPI
Day 4. Nov 8th
Spend: $724
Shoutouts: 4
Exposure: ~8M followers
Range: 2hr to 4hr shoutouts
Downloads: ~7.8k
Result: ~$0.09 CPI
At this point I ran out of budget and could not continue spending money on the app. You can see I tried to ramp up towards the weekend with the campaign and it worked! I charted in a lot of countries by Sunday, Nov 9th and Android coming in in the middle of the week around Nov 12th.
Android Downloads
(read at the end why i decided to block my app name out of screenshots)
iPhone Downloads
(read at the end why i decided to block my app name out of screenshots)
On Android I got into 44 countries in top 500 of the actual top free arcades. And as I remember about 50 countries within top 50 in top new free (appannie doesn’t track that category)
(read at the end why i decided to block my app name out of screenshots)
I reached #50 Adventure Arcade on iOS in USA as well as other tier 1 countries
(read at the end why i decided to block my app name out of screenshots)
I had great search rankings on App Store during my first two weeks ranking #5 for my main keyword. Google Play had similar search rankings and I even achieved #2 trending spot in USA overall on Google Play.
The whole campaign cost me around $3,800 and to this day brought a total of 48,500 downloads across both stores which comes out to roughly $0.08 CPI. Where can you get non incentive CPI of under $0.10 these days? NOWHERE.
Total Cost: $3,800
Downloads : 48.5k
Result CPI: $0.08
Ready to get started with Instagram Shoutouts for your mobile app?
Visit www.shoutcart.com and browse available shoutouts for sale!