I paid Google 3 million yen for a pre-registration campaign for the app, but it was so pointless that the developer was disappointed and said, ``I'll never do it again.''


by

Yuri Samoilov

When you open the Google Play app, you often see apps and games that are now accepting pre-registrations. I thought that the app pre-registration campaign, which provides benefits to pre-registered users to raise expectations and have the app automatically installed at the same time as the release, is very effective, but when I actually tried using it, it was too much. Some testimonials have been published stating that the results were not as expected.

We spent $20k+ on Google Play Pre-Registration Ads. Here are the results...
https://andreaskambanis.com/google-play-store-pre-registration-campaigns/

Andreas Cambanis, the founder of Nibble Apps, an app development company that completed the meal scheduling app ' MealPrepPro ' after a long development period, decided to use Google's advance notice to let users know about the app he had put so much effort into before it was released. I decided to take advantage of the registration campaign.

The pre-registration campaign can be started 90 days before release, and when you use the campaign, the app will be displayed in search results as shown below, and the pre-registration button will be displayed on the distribution page. When a user taps this pre-registration button, the app will be downloaded the same day it is released.



After that, Mr. Cambanis was busy with beta testing and preparations for release, and in the blink of an eye, the release date of October 24, 2022 arrived. When we checked the number of pre-registered users, we found that the number was 16,171, and it was a good success. Mr. Cambanis recalled his feelings at the time, saying, ``I thought it would create a lot of momentum on the day of launch, so I was very excited.''

Then, Mr. Cambanis pressed the publish button and confirmed that the pre-registration screen had changed to the app installation screen.



However, the automatic installation did not start even after 6 hours. Mr. Cambanis tried connecting his Google Pixel to Wi-Fi, connecting it to a charging cable, and restarting it, but nothing happened.

In the case of Apple's App Store, if you pre-register, the app will be automatically installed on your iPhone and you will receive push notifications and emails like the ones below. However, I did not receive an email from Google Play, and the software was not automatically installed.



Worried, Cambanis decided to do the math to see if it was worth the money. First, when checking Google's advertising report, there were 16,171

conversions , as per the number of pre-registered users, and the cost was 17,143.57 pounds (approximately 3,150,000 yen), and the advertising cost per conversion was 1.06 pounds (approximately 195 yen) )was.



However, the number of installs was only 1371, and less than one-tenth of the conversions were not installed. In other words, the actual advertising cost per ad was 12.5 pounds (about 2300 yen) instead of 1.06 pounds.



Mr. Cambanis commented, ``To put it a little more modestly in a British style, I would say ``not great,'' and in American English, I would say ``disaster.''

Thinking there was a mistake, Cambanis contacted Google support, and the person in charge pointed out that the ad campaign was missing assets (promotional images and text), but the pre-registration campaign It is possible to do this without any assets. The representative also said, 'Actually, it was installed 29,767 times,' which was from another campaign Nibble Apps ran a few years ago.

After that, Mr. Cambanis spent many weeks asking for a response, but in the end nothing changed.

'When you use pre-registered ads, you put full trust in Google as to whether or not you'll get the conversions you see in your ad reports,' Cambanis said of the takeaway from the experience. We won't know if it will be successful until we launch it. I will never use pre-registration advertising again.'

in Software, Posted by log1l_ks