What a position does after the campaign stops
An antivirus app in Australia held the top 3 for three weeks of keyword installs. This is where the position went in the six days after they stopped.
Most case studies stop on the day the campaign ends, at the best number of the run. This one carries on for a week after, because that is the part buyers actually ask about: what happens when you stop paying.
The campaign
An antivirus app on the App Store in Australia. The run was 1,905 installs over 24 days, split into 31 short sessions of 20 to 210 installs each rather than a steady daily rate.
Two keywords were promoted. Both are low-volume terms in a category where the big names buy ads instead of search placement.
What the position did while installs ran
The main keyword, antivirus, sat at 8 before the campaign started. It reached second place on day five and stayed between 2 and 4 for the rest of the run.
That is the ordinary part. A low-volume keyword in a category with little search-placement competition moves on a few hundred installs, and it moves fast.
What happened after the installs stopped
Then the installs stopped. The position went 4, then 5, then 6, then 7 over the following six days. Then it stopped moving and stayed at 7.
Two things are worth separating here.
The app did not fall back to where it started. It began at 8 and settled at 7, so a position was kept. What was not kept was the top 3: three weeks in second place did not buy a permanent seat there.
The drift also was not a collapse. It took six days, roughly a position a day, which is the store re-sorting on real activity rather than a penalty.
The keyword that did worse
The second keyword, anti virus, ran on the same schedule and behaved differently. It went from 9 to 6, and then back to 10, ending below where it started.
We do not have an explanation for that, only the observation. The two terms are close enough that anyone would expect them to move together, and they did not. If someone tells you a campaign produces predictable movement on every keyword, this is the case to hold up.
What this case does not show
No organic installs. The platform reports the installs we delivered, and it does not report how many downloads arrived on their own once the app sat in the top 3. That number is the one you actually care about, and we do not have it, so we are not going to estimate it.
No revenue and no retention. We know the app was found and installed. Whether those users stayed is not something a rewarded install can tell you.
No app name. The category, the market, the store, and the keywords are real. The app is not named, and neither is the price we paid to buy the traffic, which is our cost and not our price list.
One market, one category, two keywords. A low-volume keyword in a quiet category is the easy end of this work. The casino case is the other end, and it went nowhere.
What we take from it
Holding a position and keeping it are two different purchases. If you want the top 3 to stay, the honest plan is to keep buying at a lower volume rather than to run one burst and stop. If what you want is a durable step up from a bad starting position, one run does that, and this case puts a number on how big the step was: eight to seven.