Let’s try out some app promotion

As written, my app ‚Daily Activities‚ went live in the windows phone store today. So some promotion might be a good idea. 🙂

Beside from posting about it on my blog and in a Swiss windows phone forum, where I also asked people to help me with beta testing, I wanted to try something new (for me): Using the windows store tools for an app campaign!

This is what I did and I will tell about my experience and its progress on my blog.

In the windows phone store a developer can submit apps, check the downloads of it’s published apps and also select „promote your app“.

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When doing so, you get redirected to a site, where you can create an app campaing, this is how it looks like.

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You can see your apps/games that use advertising (show ads) and also select „promote your app“. Sidenote: Wow, I am making a lot of money with my games, about 5€ per month. 🙂

When you select „promote your app“, you get to this page:

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The app icon and screenshots were loaded automatically, when I entered the link to the app in the windows phone store. Additionally you can change the colors of the design a bit.

It seems that 100.000 ad impressions per month cost the developer $40. Hmm, ok I will give it a try…but I also have to enter my credit card number which made me think about this a second time.

About 2 months ago I registered for the „dev center benefits“ program, which is accessible from DevCenter.

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Here you have to specify an app (I used Week View), which is evaluated and depending on the evluation you get access to the „Explorer“, „Expert“ or the „Master“ program. I got granted access to the master program. 🙂

Part of this are some benefits – guess that’s the reason why it’s called „dev center benefits“. The „1 million ad impressions with AdDuplex“ seems very interesting for what I am trying to do, so I redeemed this offer.

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As a result, you get a code, which you can use to buy „ads“ for an ad-campaign in AddDuplex, a well known advertising provider for windows phone.

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After creating an account with AdDuplex, signing in and selecting „New camaping“

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…I created a logo for the ad-campaign and entered some text, all very straight forward.
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Finally you have to buy ad-space, the same thing as in MS pubCenter as shown above. This is the space, where the ad-banner of your app is shown in other apps (for which developers have chosen to show ads).

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WOW – now this is really cool – the 1 million ad impressions I got from dev center benefits are worth $990.

Finally I selected a daily budget of $10, which resulted in estimated daily impressions of 10.101. I also selected an end date of the campaing, some categories (the ad is shown in other apps in this category) and as a platform I selected windows phone 8.1.

The last one is important: Since Daily Activities only runs on windows phone 8.1 devices I guess it makes no sense to show ads for it on the older windows phones. 😉

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The screen said „pending activation“ and a tooltip above was saying that the campaign is validated and will be activated in 24-48 hours.

It will be interresting what will happen next and I will tell you. 🙂

If you see an ad of Daily Activities in another app, be fast, make a screenshot of it and send it to me! …and of course also click on it and install Daily Activities. *g*