Getting 55k downloads in 3 months spending nothing.

The magic month

As mentioned in part 1 of this series , we managed to get regular organic traffic on the website thanks to the careful content strategy which lured relevant people to the website. The second major challenge was to turn that traffic into downloads for the application.

I am not saying that we had to spend nothing to get downloads. It is a gradual process which will require some amount of money to settle down. Once settled though, it will easily give you 50k downloads without spending a single penny.

The Process

Setting right CTA on the content

We used this banner to drop as an overlay on everyone content piece once the user had scrolled to the bottom. While being elaborately descriptive, it was not very intrusive because it typically appeared once the user was done reading the blog. This strategy is not going to give you a lot of downloads. What it does do, however, is create a certain amount of brand recall in the subconscious of the people visiting your blog. If a person comes back enough number of times, he will subconsciously know what your company does even without ever actively searching for it. This is ‘Digital Branding’ in its basest form and it is effective as you will see later.

Installation of tracking pixel

Facebook and Google both give you the option of installing a tracking pixel on your webpages. This makes it easier for you to target these people through google and FB advertisements. The remarketing always did much much better than the other campaigns due to creation of the aforementioned brand recall. People remembered the application and what it does. So, when it popped up on their Facebook feed they were much more likely to install it. We got a stunning CPI of Rs. 20 (0.3$) doing this.

Doing local language advertisements

Company Co-founder Prakhar Khanduja came up with the brilliant idea of doing ads in native languages instead of doing standard english ads on FB. The result was a 60% better CPI when doing an ad in native language giving us great CPI (Approx 0.4$).

ASO- App Store Optimization

While doing all of this, as an experiment I decided to optimize the content on play store to see what results I get. As an exercise after some keywords research I picked up ‘live streaming’ , ‘live stream to facebook’ , ‘live stream to twitter’, ‘Youtube live streaming’ and different variations of these keywords. After heavily optimizing the content I let settle for approximately a month while the rest of activities were taking place.

Finally

We spent only one month doing paid activities mentioned above (Ads) during which we spent a decent amount to get approximately 15k downloads in a month. Post that something really interesting happened. The organic downloads started increasing exponentially. We started getting 700–800 downloads in a day organically because we had started ranking for relevant keywords both on Playstore and Google. We had even started ranking above Periscope and Meerkat for the terms ‘Live streaming’ and ‘live stream to facebook’!

The subsequent months saw gradual decrease in the number of organic downloads with the next three months getting 15,000 ; 10,000 & 10,000 downloads respectively. Thus spending money wisely accompanied with brand recall and ASO gave me 55,000 downloads free of cost!

You can contact me here for any queries.