Promoting a new game

Alright I know this question has been asked on the internet a ton but I am curious what means my fellow unity developers are using to promote their unity android apps.

I have seen a lot of negative opinions on advertising the app via something like Admob but I would appreciate hearing any success stories.

I know a lot of people do social networking related promotion but I don't really know how that is supposed to work so any tips on what a person does to promote an app via social networking would be cool.

What other methods are people using that are working?

 

Social promotion only works, if you build up a community during development or on your previously released games. If you are already done with the game, social promotion won't bring you much, cause you have no loyal followers and spamming users (like some individuals on this forum) to gain attention is a rather questionable form of marketing and likely to backfire.

If you have previously released game, you can do cross promotions, i.e notify the users of your previous game(s) that you have released a new product. It's completely free.

You can forget using advertising services, unless
a) You have a 5 to 6-digit number advertisement budget
b) Have a good enough monetization concept in returning the investment from a)

 

I just released on an android game on Amazon. All I do to promote is share it on social network (FB, and twitter), share and talk about it on some forums, and send it to some websites to get reviewed. Though really small amount of people have downloaded the game, I understand that because it's due to Amazon restriction. If it's on Play Store, I'm sure the number of downloads would be different. So, yeah, these are my promoting ways.

 

I wouldn't be that sure. On Google Play you have a much higher competition, so it's much harder for your game to get noticed by other players

 

True! But what we are talking here is we link player exactly to the our games, so competition has no effect on us. But after promoting day is over, that is when rough time comes in.

 

I was talking to some marketing guys about starting a group to cross rate each others apps and wondering how much 5 star rating + review is worth? With sites like fiverr you can pay $5 for someone to write a 5 star review and rating. So for $100 you get 20x 5 star ratings and reviews. Could be useful at launch or for maintenance if you had some angry reviewers. I've spent more than $100 on adwords for promoting websites, wondering if 20 high ratings would make any impact for that same money. (after getting as many friends/family to give good ratings)

I wonder what the conversion rate of potential customers is for each 5 star rating you get. I assume each 1 star rating guarantee's x people will just skip it, I wonder for each 5 star rating if that brings more than 1 new person willing to try it? I think it does have a positive impact. So if your app is $3 and a rating brings 2 people, it pays off.

 

I wouldn't waste money on this, other than that it's actually considered cheating, and Google don't like cheaters

They change the search and ranking algorithm all the time and one of the older changes was that Ratings and Rankings only quite low emphasis on rankings. What's more important is the activity. If a user downloads your app and uninstalls it after a few minutes, it won't count much toward your ranking. But if a user uses your App every day, then this will have a higher impact on your rankings.

This way it's much harder to manipulate rankings, because the only really reliable way to keep users active and using your app regularly is by delivering a good product.

 

I am with Tseng on this one, I think that paying to artificially inflate your rating will probably not work but on top of that it seems a bit unethical.

Thanks for the view on Social Promotion Tseng and henry96. And I think that is kinda what I feared/expected the opinion on advertising to be but thank you for sharing Tseng.

 

As for social promotion i do think it works, if you do it the correct way. However it will still need money as it will require running competitions etc on Facebook and so on.

 

My First game in unity... Try it out...
NeonFInger-Fighter
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dream.neonfinger

 

Very bad move dude. Not only upvoting your own game with 5-star only rankings, but also trying to spam here? You'll get what you deserve, i'll just download it for a 1-star rating pointing out your manipulation and malicious advertising methods.

Do you think people would really think that with less than 50 downloads you got 18 5-star ratings? Every developer who EVER released a game on Android market, knows: This is impossible. This would suggest a 1:1 or 1:2 download to rating ratio. No game on Android has that, not even the most successful which bribe/blackmail their players to rate it.

 

I also struggled with the same game promotion task on social media which i tried for 6 months but was able to achieve only few hundred downloads .Paid promotion doesn't work until you have a huge game budget as they ask for near about $1 or $2 for every install .Keeping in mind the difficulties faced by us i Just created a community for this purpose where we all indie developer can genuinely rate and review each other's games .Users can also upload their apps & games and set for polls with subject "Review" and two options named a)positive b)negative. members should vote apps & games in the community impartially ,the app getting most positive minus negative votes will be declared as best weekly app and should be genuinely rated and reviewed by all developers who took part in the poll. Every developer will get a fair amount of chance to promote and get genuine downloads with rating and reviews for his apps. The result of best app will be declared on every sunday.
please join this community and make it a success so that we don't have to suffer with our common problem of game promotion in future.
https://plus.google.com/communities/110016881809701344360

There is an example of uploading your game image for poll with two options .

 

Ok, checkout my game
http://gamejolt.com/games/dangerous-dave/203020
Thanks!

 

Check out the following tips for how to best use social media to effectively and inexpensively promote your app:

• Create an official Page for your app - Make sure you have plenty of detail within the page. Using screenshots of your app, along with a call to action within the header picture will certainly help to make your app visible.
• Social Media Profiles - If you’re already in the social media game and have a Twitter profile, Facebook page or Linkedin page, make use of that space to promote your app.
• Be Consistent and Active
• Join relevant groups
• Create your own Facebook group
• Reward Users for Social Shares
• Cooperate with Social Media Influencers
• Ads - According to a 2o16 report by Kenshoo, mobile app ad click-through rates (CTRs) went up 32% YoY, while the inverse happened to CPC (cost per click), which decreased by 33%. Because of their broad audiences, social media ads is an effective promotion way.

Based on the pics we can find that, promote app on social netword is one of the effective ways to promote app, no matter iOS or Android.

Based on the survey, here are 4 other effective ways to promote your app.

• App Store Optimization - App Store Optimization is the process of optimizing your app store listing so that your app can rank higher in the search results, if you know little about aso, you can consult aso company, like asotop1, which can give your professional aso advice.
  
• Build Word of mouth - Most people give a little more trust to their friends and families.
  
• Reach to Top Charts
• Make your apps become pre-loaded -Cooperate with the the cellphone manufactures. Although it might cost a large amount of money, it can be the efficient way to increase the download quantity and promote your app products.
  

 

I know this is way late, but I just released my app on Google Play Store ( it will be soon be published on iOS):

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.simpleworker.turbobear17

Kind regards

 

I dont know it is right place to give our game link. Anyway please check the game in android. It is a simple 2d physics game. Let us know your valuable feedback.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dts.bucketthem

 

Social promotion need more time and energy,

 

Thanks for all the suggestions guys..I am actually following and implementing a lot of them..
If you could download my latest beta game and play and if you like the game please rate..

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.obs.shinobisidescoller&hl=en

 

You couldn't find worse sounds.