How to Rank an App Higher in Category or Top Charts?

Overview:
As per the market research as well as our experience so far, in order to boost category ranking or top chart ranking, the core concept is to drive high volume in short time which is also called burst campaign.

Note: In order to drive decent volume, it would require solid bid to get enough traction and hence a solid budget would be required. Also, you should be open minded with your budget because your competitor may out rank you during campaign thus it will require us to out spend them in order to beat your competitors.

Android v/s iOS (w.r.t. Ranking Algorithm):
As for iOS, App Store ranking algorithm reacts quite proportionally to the volume per day (usually every 5 hours). However, in case of Android, the ranking algorithm takes a lot of different factors into account. Number of installs is one, but user engagement is another one that has gained a lot of attention recently.

We would thus recommend to run a campaign involving a mix of incent and non-incent traffic over a couple of days or weeks & scale it accordingly. Budget split recommend would be 50:50 into Incent and Non-Incent.

Any Estimates?
As for iOS, we are able to do research and estimate numbers if you can share the following information to us (contact support):

• App Link: ?
• Country: ?
• Category / Top Chart: ?
• Target Tank: ?

But for Android, we really can't estimate, you may have to run campaigns to see how it goes since Play Store algorithm are not just proportional to numbers, it depends a lot on engagements.

Average Campaign Budget?
Generally, we would recommend to spend at least $10K - $20K budget per country in larger countries to achieve a rather good ranking.

Some of the smaller countries might work with a bid smaller budget too. The bid per install would need be higher as compared to the campaigns we usually run in order to drive bigger volumes in a short time. Still we would see to drive up to a 4-5 digit number of installs per day depending on your app and country.

Any Guarantee?
It's difficult to predict the number of required installs precisely to achieve a certain rank as it will depend quite a bit on how much users engage with the app. We would recommend to drive at least 1,500-2,000 installs per day (of which a couple hundred should be non-incentivized) to get decent results in countries like Italy.

We wouldn't expect too much organic traffic with a top 100 ranking in the Lifestyle category. The higher the ranking, the more organic traffic is going to result and best results usually come with a top 10 ranking. This, however, requires a budget of $10K - $20+.

Note about Burst Campaign (Managed Campaign):
We are able to do high volume in short time (burst campaigns), but we need to make it a managed campaign (it will be managed by backend team internally). Please note that we don't charge any extra fees for managing the campaigns. What we do is to connect to numerous other traffic sources to scale the campaign and to get the traffic type that is required.

Some Recommendations (tailored by our experience):

• In case you look to run a burst campaign, it makes sense to aim for a ranking as high as possible as resulting organic traffic is increasing exponentially with the ranking. This is actually backed by research. We would thus suggest to target a top 10 overall ranking or at least a top 5 category ranking.
• It usually doesn't make sense to underspend as a top 100 ranking in e.g. the Lifestyle category will not result in too much organic traffic. A top 10 overall ranking is likely to result in quite a bit of organic installs.
• Additionally, we would recommend to rather focus on a smaller set of countries or just one country and to rather spend big in this country to get a more transparent ranking as compared to ok rankings in a lot of different countries.

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Just an example to give you an idea:

Please find some sample estimates on required daily budget to achieve these rankings below:-

 

Top 5 Lifestyle category:

Country	Ranking	Budget
DE	Top 5	$2,000
FR	Top 5	$2,000
IT	Top 5	$1,350
CH	Top 5	$200
TR	Top 5	$1,000

 

Top 10 overall:

Country	Ranking	Budget
DE	Top 10	$9,000
FR	Top 10	$20,000
IT	Top 10	$10,000
CH	Top 10	$2,500
TR	Top 10	$20,000