Hey, this is the Daily Overpass! My name is Eric and I make apps. Today... Today, let's talk about
how much money you should spend on advertising your app.
Alright. So today, I want to answer a question that came in earlier this week
from True Dreams, who said, "I want to ask you something about app marketing. Like
how much should I invest in my game? I invested $15 and got 300 downloads. Like
so, this investment will increase day by day, which I do feel I'm wasting my money.
Can you tell please tell me how much maximum I should invest on my app? This
is also the biggest problem when it comes to promotion, since people are
also uninstalling that and some people play that. So, here I am talking about -
here I am talking about 300 downloads." So like, okay, so first of all - no, I can't
tell you how much maximum you should spend. That's like a, you know, that's
probably one of the hardest things when it comes to advertisements
because when it comes to promoting your app, you have lots of free
avenues out there. Like if you went into social me - like you became like a big
social media person out there and use, when it started spamming everyone and
trying to do backlinks and all that kind of stuff. And that's one way of
doing it. The fast way is through the advertisements. So be actually
paying money to get users in. But it depends on how much money you make from
a user. Now, if you talk to anybody, I mean, everybody I've ever talked to about
mobile advertisement assort or using ads from where your app, they'll talk about
the lifetime value of the user. So, if your user installs your app and over the
course of however long is have it installed, say a year or whatever, if they
end up spending a dollar and you spent five cents to get them, then that's
a great investment. You just keep spending. There's no maximum.
Keep spending. Keep spending. Or if you, like if you spend a dollar to
get a user and then making you two dollars, then that's perfect. You just
keep keep putting money into that and you have a business. Now, on
the other side, if you're paying a dollar for a user and you're getting back at 75
cents or you're getting 50 cents or nothing, then you have to think about
what other reasons you're doing for having that campaign running.
Because a lot of times that's the case. I mean, every time I've run a campaign
found that I've never been in that Goldilocks spot or that sweet spot
where I'm making more money back than I'm actually spending. Usually there, my
motivations for running campaigns are - first of all, just to give a little bit
of momentum to a project. So like the downloads aren't there, the
reviews aren't there, I just need to get - I just need to get it out
there. I need to get it. If I get it into people's hands, then they'll tell,
will get word-of-mouth and I just need to get something going. It
needs a push. So, a lot of times, I don't have
ongoing campaigns. I don't have campaigns that run for years and years because
they're not - because they don't get - it's not paying money and
getting money out. It's just paying money in a lot of the times, so I'll do
something for like a few weeks and then I'll then I'll stop and see if that's
actually had any uptake along the way. So there's - I mean, there's other
motivations there too. And also think about it like, think about it like a
leaky boat, or like if you had a shop and you were selling things, then you
started advertising. If people were coming in and they weren't buying
anything, then you would stop the advertisements and think, and then focus
again on the show. What can I change here that gets people to buy things. Or like
let's say, you're gonna - so, the analogy I would use is like you're building a boat.
You're building a boat that you hope will float, right? But you don't know
yet because you don't have it in the water. And if you have an app and
nobody's using it, then you don't really know very much about it. Sometimes, you
might have to pay for advertisers and probably pay as little as possible to
get people coming into the application. And if nobody's clicking on the ads, and
nobody's, or nobody's making any in-app purchases, or you're not really making
any money from it at all, by all means you know get the boat out of the
water. Stop the ads, go back in and look at everything and think how can
you change some things. Then start it up again.The advertisements, I
mean, like - if you're making money, if you're putting in a dollar and
getting $2 out, or if you make you putting in a dollar and getting a dollar,
Oh, 105 out - that's still worth it.
Because you could just keep paying money in and you have a scale problem. You just
need more of those five cents coming back. But if that's not the case,
then, you know, if you're like me. Then you you kick off those ads for a little
while, you'll stop them, see how things go or you experiment with things
little bit there. See right now, I have a campaign running on Google's Universal
App Campaigns which I've used several times in the past. And I've used
Facebook ads a lot. I prefer Facebook ads except for the
fact that they are really, really expensive because everybody uses
Facebook ads. So, universal app campaigns, actually it's, you know, it - because
I've been reading a lot lately about how they're using machine learning
so they could look at things like search history and YouTube, and things like that.
And they could - so you say, I want people who make in-app purchases. So I'm like see
people who have made this in-app purchase and find people like that. And
then the the machine learning will go out and do all that supposedly, but you
have to leave it going for a while to find out if it works. Anyway, I'll let you,
guys, know how that works. You'll want some. I'm gonna give it at least, at least
a month at twenty dollars a day. So, let's see how it goes. This is it. One
of the problems - another problem with advertisement - sorry to run about, run
out about this, is that sometimes your sample size is too slow - like it's too
small. Like in the past, I would like start an ad campaign and I
would run it for like an hour and then I get scared, whoh! It's too much money!
Nobody's buying, whatever, nobody's downloading, whatever. And
I'd stop it. And eventually, I find that, yeah, I have to leave it running for
a little bit. So, it's - you know, you've got the different metrics there,
you've got how much are you paying per click, of those clicks
how many conversions are you getting?How many people are actually
downloading it? And then, it's ultimately the one thing that you're really looking
at is, how much money are you making from that user? It's not
just each individual users like all of them together. Take your revenue take, all
your users, divide that and find out what each one is making on average. And if
the sample size is too small, then you don't get consistent - you don't get
consistent figures. Anyway, I hope that makes sense a little bit today. This is
just such a tricky issue. I struggle with this all the time.
I'm always running ads. I'm always removing ads. I'm always changing it as
I'm always thinking, you know, let me try this. Let's do something new. Let's
change up the wording. Ultimately, what I really want to do is
is not pay for the ads. I want the the word-of-mouth to spread. I want when
a user comes in, I want them to be able to share that with different people.
I want them, but if nobody's coming in at all, nobody knows about it, then ads are
the best way forward. So, anyway, I hope that helps. That's it for today. Oh, and
for those of you, guys, who are killing it with ads and you have tips and tricks,
please let us know in the comments. Because I'm sure lots of people out
there would want to know. So, that's it for today. That's it for this week and
I'll talk to you, guys, on Monday!