5 steps you can take to get more app downloads

All mobile developers want the same thing: to increase the number of people that download their app. Growth hacking is still everyone’s top priority. (Well, except for Bing Gordon. He wants you to worry about retention, but I’ll soon get to why these steps for app growth inherently increase retention.)

The proven and unproven ways to organically increase app downloads

We’ve all heard the stats about how competitive the app ecosystem is today, and how you’re destined to fail. But you plug along anyway. You’re an indie developer through and through. This app is your passion project and you’re determined to see it succeed. You’ve become immune to the lure of the high-paying consulting gig your roommate comes home from and aren’t even annoyed that your mom still thinks you’re unemployed. But your app has hit a wall and you’re running out of ideas. If you were to come knocking at my door at this moment, looking for help, I’d tell you six things. One, you got lucky and picked the right door. The next five things would be my top tips for increasing app downloads.

1. Use smart banners to convert mobile web to app users

Mobile web remains very important for mobile apps. Developers use it to drive brand awareness and traffic on mobile devices in ways that apps (currently) can’t. There are two main ways that users end up on a mobile website: through organic search or a link. On a mobile device, web search is one of the best ways to get discovered. Hopefully, when someone enters a query in  Google (or Bing, ha!), your mobile site pops up. (Important: This is why it’s crucial you have a strong web presence with indexed content. Google will not automatically return your app content on search. Skip to step 4 for more on that.)

If you receive organic traffic to your mobile website, it’s up to you to design an experience that will drive people to your app. The best method for this is a smart banner. As simple as this seems, smart banners continue to drive mobile downloads. After analyzing 12 million link clicks across our platform, we found that 15.5 percent of smart banners clicks result in an install. That’s actually pretty high compared to most channels.

Click-to-install rate by channel

The second way users find themselves on a mobile website is from a link click. Sometimes, the mobile web is used (correctly) as an interstitial before a new user is routed to the app store. In fact, compared to sending someone directly to the app store after a link click, sending them to a mobile web splash with a View in the App call-to-action converts users 2 to 6 times better. This is why we created Deepviews to allow developers without a website to benefit from this uplift in conversion. Web banners work because of Cialdini’s principle of reciprocity (please read this book if you haven’t already). By giving users a preview, or a free sample, of the app content you want them to see, they are more inclined to give the app a try.

2. Provide a personalized app onboarding

Onboarding continues to be a crucial step in converting valuable users. I won’t go into too many details since we’ve already covered this topic in length. In summary, the app store is a huge barrier to entry, but so is a generic welcome flow. By giving users a personalized experience, you provide them value right off the bat. My favorite type of personalized welcome utilizes the Cialdini principle of social proof (I’m serious, read the book). 77 percent of app users reported downloading an app in the past six months because of a recommendation from a friend or family. Why not remind users that they came from a friend’s recommendation when they open the app for the first time? Gogobot did this by showing the name and profile picture of the referring user and saw a 78 percent lift in conversion to sign up.

Now, I know what you’re saying to yourself: “The title of this article was about driving app downloads. Onboarding is after my users have already downloaded the app.” You caught me. But this is where Bing Gordon has my back. What good are app downloads if they don’t convert into active users? Spoiler alert: none. Well, except for maybe costing a lot of money and providing you with some vanity metrics. “Hey Mom! Yeah my app’s doing great. I got [cough bought] 100 new downloads this week [cough and I’ll never see them again].”

The best personalized welcomes rely on deep links to pass information through the app store that you want to show a new user. The newest research shows that day-1, day-7, and day-30 retention rates double for users who come from a deep link.