After months of hard work, your app is finally ready to launch! You’ve put so much effort into developing, but have you thought about how you’ll market it? A full 60% of apps have never been downloaded, not even once. Don’t become a statistic. Take a minute to think about your goals so that you can optimize a marketing campaign to reach them.

There are four main objectives for app campaigns:

1. You want to drive app installs at scale, for a competitive Cost-Per-Install (CPI). Use this approach when you aren’t sure who your ideal customer is and need to cast a wide net.
2. You want to acquire high-quality users and are willing to pay a higher CPI to get them. This approach is only a good idea when you have a clear monetization model.
3. You’re looking to re-engage your existing users. 20% of all downloaded apps are only used once, 95% of downloaded apps are abandoned within 30 days of install. Just because you have a lot of downloads, doesn’t mean your app is being used.
4. You just want to get the word out about your app or company, but not necessarily drive installs.

No matter which of the four objectives describe you, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that you’ll need a solid mobile marketing strategy—running search ads on desktop will be a waste of money.

First things first though, you need to optimize your app for app store searches. There are over 1.5 million apps in Google Play, and another 1.5 million in the Apple App Store and 82% of users never browse past the top 25 search results. So optimizing will be key to your success.

The most important factors in app store optimization are listed below, ranked in order of importance for page rank:

1. App name (don’t stuff in keywords or be long winded in the Apple Store, you’ll be penalized)
2. Description (Google Play only, description doesn’t exist in the Apple Store)
3. Keywords (Apple Store only, keywords don’t exist in Google Play)
4. Developer’s name
5. Category

Once you’re optimized for the app store, it’s time to start marketing! Google offers several options from Universal App Campaigns that auto-optimize for your target CPI, to TrueView in-stream ads that appear in the YouTube app and offer a seamless user experience. Using these options, your ad will show not just on Google.com search results and in the YouTube app, but in the Play Store, Apple Store, within other apps, on the Google Display Network.

You can even target your campaign to your apps existing users (in order to re-engage them) or exclude those people from seeing your ads completely.

On a final note, it is important to understand that app install campaigns are built differently from other AdWords campaigns—many of the AdWords best practices are opposite for app campaigns.  If this all seems far too complicated, contact Anvil so that your hard work doesn’t go to waste.