Understanding the Relationship Between Paid and Organic Installs Final
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For every paid install of an app, the app can expect an additional 1.5 organic installs on average across all categories and platforms. However, the relationship between paid and organic installs varies by category and operating system. For example, an iOS game can expect 5.4 organic installs for each paid install, while an Android tools app can expect only 0.3 organic installs for each paid install. Marketers can use these organic multiplier metrics to inform their marketing strategies and balance of paid versus organic install efforts.
Understanding the Relationship Between Paid and Organic Installs Final
- 1. Understanding the Relationship Between Paid and Organic Installs A STUDY ON HOW PAID DOWNLOADS IMPACT ORGANIC DOWNLOADS
- 2. Understanding the Relationship Between Paid and Organic Installs PAGE 1 Understanding the Relationship Between Paid and Organic Installs Compared to online or digital marketing, mobile app marketing is still in its infancy. Although relatively young in years, it has matured and evolved at an astounding rate. This evolution has largely been driven by consumers spending more time on mobile devices and within apps, which has led to a significant shift of time, money, and other marketing resources towards these areas. As this transition continues, and organizations focus more on marketing their apps, it's becoming increasingly important for brands to clearly understand the implications of their ad spend - particularly as it pertains to the unique relationship between paid and organic marketing. The balance between paid and organic marketing that exists in the online world, seems to have been lost somewhere along the way in app marketing. In certain instances, a one-sided approach has worked and resulted in very successful apps. A STUDY ON HOW PAID DOWNLOADS IMPACT ORGANIC DOWNLOADS ABSTRACT The following white paper covers a study conducted by TUNE (parent company of MobileDevHQ and MobileAppTracking). The goal of the study was to answer the question: for every paid install, how many organic installs can an app expect to see? The results indicate that there is a significant positive correlation between paid and organic installs, and also show that the direct impact on organic installs varies depending on the category and operating system (OS) of the app. Read on to see how many organic installs an app can expect to see for each paid install, segmented by category and OS.
- 3. Understanding the Relationship Between Paid and Organic Installs PAGE 2 Apps that rely heavily on paid marketing usually have an extremely accurate lifetime-value (LTV) measurement and marketers know exactly how much they can afford to spend on paid installs. It makes sense for them to tap a reliable and steady source of downloads through a publisher such as Twitter. Other apps, like Flappy Bird, have zero marketing spend and still manage to dominate the Top Charts purely through organic installs. It’s important to remember that these types of apps are the outliers and not the norm. For the other 99.9% of apps, having a strategic mix between paid and organic marketing efforts is vital to success because of the unique relationship between paid and organic installs. In the app world, running paid install campaigns boosts two (of the many) specific metrics that impact an app’s rank in the app store: total downloads and download velocity. With these paid campaigns, the boost to both metrics also increases the app’s ranking in the Top Charts and search, which leads to greater visibility and more organic downloads. Experienced app marketers are aware that, on some level, an increase in paid installs will lead to an increase in organic installs, which isn’t ground-breaking news. But is there any way to quantify an approximate multiplier for the impact of paid installs on organic installs? Or in other words, for every paid install, how many organic installs can an app expect to see? Methodology Using anonymized data from thousands of apps (data provided by TUNE), we were able to calculate a coefficient that significantly correlates paid and organic installs. We then ran a linear regression between the paid and organic installs. To validate the regression models, we checked residuals, adjusted R square, and p-values (an indicator of significance). Our requirement for the data to be sufficient was a correlation greater than 0.4 and a p-value less than 0.05. Paid Campaign More Downloads + Increased Download Velocity Increased Top Charts and Search Ranking Increase Visibility More Organic Downloads
- 4. Understanding the Relationship Between Paid and Organic Installs PAGE 3 We also segmented the data by different categories and operating systems because these factors affect the results, which show the impact of paid installs on organic installs across all apps. In addition, we created a table that highlights the impact of paid installs on several distinct app categories. Generalized Results: Is the Effect Real? The first thing we wanted to test was the general impact of paid installs on organic installs across all categories and both app stores (Google Play and Apple). Essentially, we wanted to know if paid installs really do have a significant impact on organic installs. The Business Intelligence team at TUNE analyzed the relationship between paid and organic installs for thousands of advertisers (apps paying for installs) over the course of 245 days. They found an extremely strong relationship, and can say with 95% confidence that for every paid install an app receives, it can expect to also acquire an additional 1.5 organic installs. For all of the findings in this study, one important factor is that this is a trend, and scale matters. Many of the conclusions drawn in this white paper are from apps with millions of downloads (e.g. for every one million paid installs, advertisers can expect to see an additional 1.5 million organic installs). So although the trend can be applied to apps paying for downloads on a smaller scale, the confidence levels and p-values come from numbers on a larger scale. The following scatter plot shows the direct correlation between paid and organic installs. Paid Installs OrganicInstalls 1.3e+07 1.3e+07 9.0e+06 1,000,000 1,600,0001,400,0001,200,000
- 5. Understanding the Relationship Between Paid and Organic Installs PAGE 4 These results were very encouraging, and allowed us to be confident in the underlying assumption that paid installs do have a strong positive correlation with organic installs. Although confirming the correlation can be useful, all app categories are not equal. We know that in terms of total number of apps and total downloads, some categories are more popular than others. For example, the following graph shows the distribution of iOS apps sorted by category. As you can see, the top five categories account for more than 50% of the total app population. So how strong or how varied is the correlation between paid and organic installs across different app categories and operating systems? The following section substantiates the coefficient across these factors. 22.5% 20% 17.5% 20.38%GAMES 10.36%EDUCATION 9.43%BUSINESS 8.01%LIFESTYLE 7.13%ENTERTAINMENT 5.21%UTILITIES 4.8%TRAVEL 4.31%BOOKS 3.24%MUSIC 2.87%PRODUCTIVITY 2.74%HEALTHANDFITNESS 2.73%SPORTS 2.57%REFERENCE 2.55%PHOTOANDVIDEO 2.43%NEWS 2.42%FINANCE 2.18%FOODANDDRINK 2.11%MEDICAL 1.9%SOCIALNETWORKING 1.27%NAVIGATION 15% 12.5% 10% 7.5% 5% 2.5% Source: Statista
- 6. Understanding the Relationship Between Paid and Organic Installs PAGE 5 Category-Specific Results: The App Marketer’s Cheat Sheet Knowing that paid installs do, in fact, impact organic installs, we wanted to provide more insightful data than a simple generic 1.5x metric. We calculated new multipliers for separate categories and operating systems. In the following table, you can see how many organic installs an app can expect to see for each paid install, on average. We only present categories that have sufficient correlation and p-values (correlation > 0.4 and p-value < 0.05). Therefore, not every category is listed below. This information has huge implications and can be extremely useful for informing marketing decisions and strategy. For example, an Android Tools app could look at their multiplier of 0.3, and know that they will likely have to pay for three or four downloads in order to receive one additional organic download. Armed with this information, and working with the knowledge that organic users tend to be higher quality than paid users (based on intent, engagement, revenue, ratings, etc.), they might decide to pay a premium and work with a publisher who can deliver a high quality, targeted, paid user. *Predicted Organic Installs = Paid Installs x <Organic Multiplier> iOSANDROID CATEGORY Entertainment Games Lifestyle Social Networking Sports Utilities ORGANIC MULTIPLIER 0.9 5.4 5.2 4.8 1.5 3.9 CATEGORY Adventure Arcade Business Card Casino Casual Music & Audio Personalization Racing Shopping Strategy Tools Transportation Travel and Local Word ORGANIC MULTIPLIER 3.6 1.5 1.6 1.4 2.1 5.4 6.1 0.2 13.3 1.0 0.6 0.3 16.6 1.6 7.2
- 7. Understanding the Relationship Between Paid and Organic Installs PAGE 6 On the other hand, a marketer for an iOS Game, working with the same knowledge about user quality, might decide they can risk using a less-reputable publisher, because they will receive five high-quality organic users for every one low-quality paid user. Does this mean Android Tools shouldn’t be doing paid marketing? Absolutely not. It just implies they should be more conscious about which publishers they are choosing. There are numerous other ways this information can be applied. But it’s important to remember that these are trends based on larger scale, and they are averages. If an Android Casino app runs a one-time burst campaign for 100 downloads, we do not guarantee that they will see an additional 210 organic downloads. Bringing it All Together The harmonious relationship between paid and organic marketing is something that is truly unique to apps. Because this relationship is so strong, app marketers cannot afford to only focus on one or the other. Having a strong balance between paid and organic efforts is key to thriving as an app marketer. We hope that this white paper has helped provide understanding around how app marketing is unique, why having a balanced strategy is important, and how the relationship between paid and organic installs works. We will continue to update data and add new categories to this table in the coming months. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to research@mobiledevhq.com. For more insights on app marketing strategies and app store optimization, please visit www.mobiledevhq.com/articles.
- 8. Understanding the Relationship Between Paid and Organic Installs PAGE 7 About MobileDevHQ by TUNE MobileDevHQ is the leading enterprise organic app marketing platform. We've been working with app marketers since 2009, and over and over again, we've met smart, hungry marketers looking for better ways to get downloads for their app. Tired of spending large sums of money on paid advertising (only to generate low LTV on those users), they're turning to organic channels such as App Store Optimization (app store SEO) for low-cost, high-quality installs with a high ROI. If you’re interested in learning more, feel free to sign up for a free account today, or reach out to sales@mobiledevhq.com for a free demo! About MobileAppTracking MobileAppTracking (MAT) is the industry standard for mobile app marketers to measure performance, and builds best-in-class tools to help marketers attribute their user acquisition, engagement, and retention campaigns to the appropriate channels and partners. MAT provides attribution for more than half of the top grossing apps in the iTunes and Google Play stores today. Customers include: Supercell, Spotify, Kayak, Uber, Square, EA, G5, Sephora, Hipmunk, LINE, Gilt, JackThreads, William Hill, Gumi, Nickelodean, Zoosk, eHarmony, and eBay Korea. To learn more about MAT, you can visit their website at www.MobileAppTracking.com