What are good ways to promote an app in Google Play?

Go through this article and read the experiment done by Jeff Fisher, CEO, Android Marketing Inc.

To answer your question, we need to first know how Android App ranking is decided. Google has, indeed, adopted a very sophisticated system in determining the ranking of an App for a keyword. The criteria taken into account are listed as follows:

(1) Number of Installs

(2) Retention Rate (how many days an App stays installed on a device?)

(3) Rating (out of 5.0) and a number of ratings and reviews).

(4) The number of backlinks to your App's Google Play page.

The most important criteria is (1), it weights about 60-70% in determining to rank, therefore, your main task is to get as many installs as possible in a short period of time.

The next question is, how to get installs? There are many ways:

(1) Improve your App's quality. It could be done by making your game bug-free, hiring an expert artist to improve your game's graphical quality, etc. (many App developers rely too much on their own artistic senses, the result of which is that the appearance of Apps are not appealing to users on Google Play Store, resulting in loss of downloads). With good game quality, you get more positive reviews and ratings and players are more willing to download your App.

(2) Cost-per-install campaigns. You can purchase a large number of installs to boost your App's ranking on Google Play. It is actually essential as there are no better ways to acquire visibility to your App (if you choose to spend tens of thousands of dollars on billboard, TV or newspaper adverts, you easily cost more than USD$10 per install)

Now here comes the trick:

Out of all providers, I genuinely recommend KeyApp.top, since it provides USA, installs at the cheap rate of 0.09 USD per install and it can deliver up to 10,000 installs in a single day. The installs are from real users and not bots so you can see users’ activities in your App. More importantly, KeyApp currently provides 20 USD free credits for new users, so you can test the effect of this install provider without spending a cent.

Experiment by: Jeff Fisher, CEO, Android Marketing Inc.

As a personal experiment, he had spent $100 on Key app to obtain installs for his own game, split into 10 days. As you can see, after his campaign started, his game’s keyword ranking raised from around 35 to 17–18 at the end of the campaign, and kept at a similar level even after the end of his campaign. 

His organic install per day from USA grew from around 300 per day to 500 per day at the end of a campaign. A pretty impressive result considering he only spent $100.

(3) App Store Optimization. It can be done by making a good looking icon for your App, including good looking screenshots, and a good description with good keywords included. Good keywords can be found on Sensor Tower - Mobile App Store Marketing Intelligence It is advised that one should localize the app's name and keywords into different languages - even if you don't have a translator, Google Translate can help you, having localized keyboards can, according to a study, bring 30% more users to your App, so it is surely worth the effort (I guess localizing Apps will take less than 1% of your apps development resources!).

I hope my advice may assist you, wish a huge success for your App.