Category Archives: Marketing

Advertising, Android, Marketing, Misc, Software, Uncategorized

A Beta star is born

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Where can you find Google play beta apps nowadays ? In the past you could simply go to the app store and click on “Early Access” and you were given a list of apps which are currently in open Beta testing.

Come 2019, things on the play store have changed and it is hard to impossible to find those beta apps anymore. Without much of any announcement google has removed the link and it is now up to the developers to stir up some marketing SEO, and social campaigns to point to the link in the Google play store.

I have created a new version of CPU Information in the past weeks called CPU Information Pro

After working and sweating for some time to pull this app together I pushed it into Open Beta testing and was expecting that it will be visible to those who are seeking out new apps and early versions of games. However, the google play beta apps page is no more and so there is little a user can do in order to actively seek out the latest new apps by himself through the pay store.

On the social front, a developer can now find users willing to test their app on Facebook ( Of Course ).

Pinterest is another social opportunity to promote your beta app, and so are Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and others.

Since I still have my Google+ account until April 2 this year ( 2019 ), I also went ahead and added a tink on my page there as well as on the collective Beta Testing Apps – page.

Of course I also created a special web page for CPU INformation Pro where the app can feel right at home and where I display all the goody-goodies of it. And while I have the space, I also added a lot of nice screen captures and images to display the app to the best of my abilities.

All of this is however no substitute for the might of the Play Store’s recommendation and browsing abilities. So it leaves a void for developers of new apps and games to display and promote them during the crucial startup-phase.

I have posted the question on Reddit Here and Here and there does not seem to be another way to get Open Beta to test users.

And so google has left you on your own

Over the past few month google has been changing things around for app developers, and for Android users.

As things stand it may get worse for the developer community as google set out to replace Android with Fuchsia OS in the near future. Wile I don’t want to get into the insanity of why this does not make any sense for them to do so IMHO, it just goes to show the changing relationship from a formerly supportive, open and engaging company towards a closed system company.

It seems google is on track to repeat Microsofts’ mistakes from the 90’s. A mistake Microsoft is now trying hard to fix and honestly if things continue this way they will take a bigger bite out of googles cake.

Googles biggest mistake in the past has been to remove Don’t be Evil from their Code of Conduct. The replacement with Do the right thing is a complete takeover of corporate greed. The right thing for google ( Aka Alphabet ) is to make money and is not bound to any other human values, thus the right thing may as well be to pass on all your information to the Kremlin or to the Chinese government.

Okay I am not saying that this is what is going on, I just want to point out that the lack of social value in this sterile term “Do the right thing” is a shift in how google approaches the rest of the world.

Google Play Beta Apps gone “bye bye”

At this point in early 2019 developers and Android users alike have lost the ability to connect through the Play store for Early Accessing apps and games. And as of now there is no official way to replace this lost ability.

There is only hope for either google fixing this missing piece or fro a third party to jump in and offer a means to provide this information in a structured and searchable manner to Android users and developers.

Advertising, App Review, Marketing

Android SEO app

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If you have a blog, a web-page, or any other kind of online-content which you want to expose online and grow your customer base or readership, you will have to do SEO.

Search Engine Optimization is the methodology to increase your sites visibility in the search engines, such as Google or Bing. Increasing your position in the search results by just one or two positions could mean the difference between earning money or closing your doors ( virtually ) forever.

SEO as a Sport

There are a ton of resources available online and offline to learn all about SEO. Most of those however are pointed to some sales funnel or describe some kind of oversimplified rules and tools.

The thing I have learned about SEO is that there is no certain way of doing SEO which will always work. Instead, you should see it as an art rather than a science project.
 
If you play it like a game and you keep at it for a long time you will certainly see more or less results.
 
Where to start on your journey and how to go about your initial steps in ranking better will be overwhelming. There is google trends, keyword suggestion tools like this , Alexa site ranking, Backlink checker, and tools which help you to discover more about your sites appeal on the internet than you could ever ask for.

Black-hat-techniques

I mentioned above that there is no sure fire way to improve your ranking. This is of course in regard to SEO. You can always count on search engine ranking you higher for better content. If your site has the highest authority about any subject, you will get ranked accordingly. This is the number one ingredient to your sites success. SEO is the second most important thing you can do to rank your site well with search engines.

There are however some ways to get punished if you go about it the wrong way. Black-hat-SEO is one of the easiest ways to get your site ignored by the search engines. Stay away from any of those if you want your site to be visible to any human being.

For example, if you pay someone to build a huge amount of backlinks ( other web pages pointing to your web page ), then you have great chances to get your page ranking dropped by Google to a place in hell, which in Google land is a rank of 1.000.000.000 +.

Do the right thing

However there are White hat ways to improve your rankings. Such as adding good and meaningful contents on a regular basis or building the best blog, web-site or whatever it is you want to rank
 
This of course required hard work and takes in general a long time.
 
Another approved of way to get more visitors is of course through paid advertising, especially if you use Goggles AdWords.
 
Using a keyword planning tool to make certain your site is ranked for the right keyword is another way to increase your ranking. As a matter of fact, keywords are so important to you ranking that you will have to dive in and really learn as much as you can about them.

 

What to do

The question for most people then boils down to what-to-do, when-to-do-it, and how-to-do-it. Especially as a beginner this can be challenging as you don’t know the rules and tools yet and you don’t want to get yourself into hot water.
 
Enter “Free SEO Tool”, the Android app which provides you with a shorthand way is playing with SEO tools from all around.

It offers a collection of tools in one convenient spot. The resulting report for your website spans 25 pages and will also explain reach of the analyzed sections in the report. You can also export the report as a PDF version and share the results with others.
 
Give this app a try and see how you can improve on you online present to increase your visibility. The report is huge but easy to read and understand. The required changes on your site should become obvious, and best of all, its free to boot.

Get it on Google Play

Get it on Google Play

Advertising, App Review, Marketing, Misc, Uncategorized

Throwing money at google

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Here, take these $26.​60 google to find me some nice people to install my app.
... but why would you do that ? Google already rakes in billions of dollars in revenue … Well let me tell you why.

I have been running a few AdWord campaigns in the past and I wanted to run a new ad campaign for my latest app :
CPU Information

CPU Information

As I just started out with this campaign and as I am not a huge corporation but a small indy-developer, I started with $20,- and thought to myself I want to get up a bit on the high side and then reduce my bid target to stretch the money throughout a 24 hour time period. So I started to target at $0.15 per conversion.

Chill time

Off I went onto doing different things. Then about an hour later I checked back and I had spend $26.60 already on this campaign. so 30% over budget and way earlier than expected. However this is not the reason I told you that I threw money at Google, the real head scratcher came when I wanted to correlate the approximately 200 conversions to my play store account.

Interestingly The play store hourly installs did not budge at all. So it is almost as if another app profited from my investment :(. I have no idea how this may have happened as I would have expected to see at least the bump of an additional 200 installs during that time period. Also My AdMob account showed the same unmoved result, as if nothing had happened and the 200 conversions did not reach my app at all.

I have shifted my approach now and reduced my bids down to $0.05 to stretch the installs out. Next thing to do is to go and dig a little bit deeper into stats from Firebase, the Play store, AdMob, and AdWord.

I want to find out what happened to my supposed conversions and the approx 42k views of my app. If you have an idea of what could be going on, please share and let me know.

AdWord where …

After some more digging I found one issue with the campaign which was location. Originally I wanted to only target the US and Canada. I set this up but I must have forgotten to click on the [Save] button before starting the campaign.
Thus my ads were distributed worldwide and a good chunk of the installs went to the southern hemi-sphere, to countries like Libya, Algeria, Iraq, India to name a few.

While this explains why the money was exhausted as fast as it was at the target bid prices, as well as why my AdMob revenue did not jump up. After all the cost-per-click in these regions is usually way below
what you will get in the northern hemi-sphere, I.e.  Europe or northern America. 
So from a regional targeting you get more per click however at the same time it is also way more expensive to get traffic to your app.

App Store stats …

I am still investigating as to why my app-store does not reflect the additional 200 installs.

And finally this mystery has been solved as well. It took The play store around 6hours to get the hourly stats to reflect the actual installs which came from this one-time boo-boo of mine.

What have we ( I ) learned

  • Be careful when starting a new ad campaign. Going forward I will set the max allowance to a small enough amount so that in case something does ot work out as expected, I can re-adjust before go all in.
  • Look at the stats of all available sites, like AdMob, AdWord, Google Play, and Firebase
  • Be patient. I have had some interesting correlation dissonance happened to me in the past. Especially the google play store stats are somewhat funky.