113 low-volume keywords on 20 to 30 installs a day
A Health & Fitness app in Canada ran keyword installs on 113 low- and mid-volume terms. The pacing rule, the volume it took, and what the numbers do not say.
A pet project in Health & Fitness on the App Store, promoted in Canada. No performance budget, about 30 to 40 installs a month in that market, and no visibility to speak of: the app's Apptweak Visibility Score sat at zero.
This case is here for the pacing rule rather than the result. The campaign ran on low- and mid-volume keywords at two installs a day per keyword, and that number is the part worth copying.
Why Canada
The method the app teaches comes from Canada and already has a following there, so the audience knows the words it searches with. Canada also costs less to move than the United States while behaving similarly, which makes it a cheap place to run the experiment before deciding whether a bigger market is worth the budget.
The metadata came first
The team collected more than 300 search terms around eating habits and weight, then rewrote the title and the subtitle around the ones the app could plausibly rank for. Nothing on this step involves us: it is ordinary text optimization, and without it the installs would have had nothing to attach to.
The pacing rule
113 keywords went into the campaign, all low- and mid-volume, run as keyword installs. The rule was two installs a day per keyword with a popularity above five, held for five days. Across the whole campaign that added up to 20 to 30 installs a day.
Keywords were promoted in clusters rather than one by one, starting with the terms closest to the app's method and moving outward: healthy eating first, then general weight loss, then calorie counting, where the audience wants a different approach but the same outcome.
A keyword that did not reach the top of results in those five days, or fell straight back once installs stopped, was parked and revisited later at the same two a day. That is the cheap half of the rule: the budget goes to terms that respond, and the rest wait.
What the three months produced
The Apptweak Visibility Score went up fourfold. Organic installs, compared before the campaign against during it, went up 2.5 times. Cost per user across the three months was $0.75, and the campaign paid back in two.
Two of those numbers need their units said out loud. The Visibility Score is Apptweak's own index of how often the app shows up for its keywords and in its category, not a count of installs, so a fourfold move there is a visibility measure and nothing else. The $0.75 is the client's arithmetic across the whole three months, campaign spend against users acquired, not a price we charge.
What this case does not show
Summer is the high season for the weight-loss category, and the campaign ran into it. Some of the organic growth belongs to that and we did not separate the two.
It also stops at installs. There is no revenue, no retention, and no conversion number here, because the data we had ends where the campaign does.
And it is one small app in one market. The rule of two installs a day per low-volume keyword is what carried over to other campaigns; the fourfold visibility is not a number anyone should expect to repeat.