Mobile app promotion: seven channels and what each does

This guide covers promotion on the two stores that matter for most apps, the App Store and Google Play. We go through the main marketing tools one by one, explain how keywords work, and show how they affect where an app appears in search.

It is meant for marketers, PMs, and developers who handle promotion for an app themselves and want it to rank higher and pull in more organic traffic.

Promoting an app is different from promoting a website, because the app reaches people through a store. You have to learn how each store works and follow its rules. So a mobile marketer has two jobs at once: beat the competition and get into the first few search results.

Why store search deserves your attention

For free organic downloads, store search is the biggest source. According to Sensor Tower, close to 60% of all iOS downloads start with a search, and Google Play shows numbers in the same range.

Those downloads cost you nothing, because appearing in search results is free. They are also organic in the useful sense: someone who typed in the feature they need is more likely to stay in the app and pay for something inside it.

Why the position itself matters

Store search behaves a lot like web search: people look at the first few results and rarely scroll further. The top three apps for a query take roughly 70% of its downloads. Once an app slips below third place, it loses a large share of the organic users that query could bring.

How stores rank apps in general

Ranking works as a filter that puts the most relevant and trusted apps first. The closer an app matches what the person searched for, the higher it appears and the more likely it is to be installed.

Apple and Google keep their ranking rules private. That makes it harder for marketers to game the system and keeps the top places mostly in the hands of user behavior.

What moves an app up on Google Play and the App Store

Since the stores do not publish their rules, the factors below are what people in the industry have worked out from observation:

• how many times the app has been installed in total (the install base);
• ratings and reviews from users;
• how often the app crashes;
• how regularly it gets updates;
• how many people have deleted it;
• how many times people open the app and come back to it on different days;
• on Google Play, links to the app from outside the store, such as reviews and mentions around the web, may count as well.

For search specifically, three more things carry a lot of weight: how well the title, description, and keywords match the query, how many downloads the app gets from that particular keyword, and what share of people who view the store page go on to install.

The main ways to promote an app in 2026

Now to the methods themselves. In most cases a mix of tools works better than any single one. Steady ASO work, looking after your reputation, rewarded installs, and influencer campaigns, run together, can keep an app high in search for a long time. How you combine them depends on the app, the resources you have, and your company's approach to marketing.

Mobile marketing comes down to seven channels:

1. ASO (App Store optimization)
2. Rewarded installs from search
3. Reputation in the store
4. Advertising
5. Social media
6. The app's website
7. Blogging and PR

Here is what each of them involves.

1. App Store optimization

ASO is the long process of tuning an app's store page so that it ranks higher in store search and turns more page views into installs.

It sits at the center of an app's marketing. The work starts with the basic assets (title, description, screenshots) and continues all the way to managing ratings and reviews.

In many ways ASO resembles SEO, which has been practised for about twenty years. You pick the metadata and visuals (icon, screenshots) that help the app climb in keyword search, so that people find it, download it, and install it more easily.

What counts as a keyword

A keyword is whatever a person types into App Store or Google Play search to find an app. For example: ‘snapchat’, ‘taxi’, ‘mario’, ‘free games’, ‘photo editor’.

What a keyword set is

A keyword set is every keyword and keyword combination that describes your app: what it does, what it offers, which tasks it solves, what people can buy inside it. Putting this set together is one of the first real tasks in promoting any app.

An app that sells plane tickets might build its core from ‘flight’, ‘airline tickets’, ‘cheap tickets’, ‘buy tickets’, ‘tickets to Amsterdam’, ‘check-in’, ‘vacation’ and ‘travel’.

What people actually search for

Most searches are for a particular app or brand by name (TikTok, for example). Searches for a function, such as ‘edit photo’, come second, and brand searches clearly outnumber them.

All ten of the most popular App Store queries are app or brand names, and brands make up about 60% of the top 500.

Using other companies' brands as keywords

Usually you can. How far you can go depends on the store's policy and, on the App Store, on the person who reviews your app. With trademarked names, be careful.

2. Rewarded installs from search

The category usually calls this incentive traffic: people get a reward for doing something in or around your app. In mobile marketing it is used mostly to raise an app in App Store and Google Play search, to lift its rating, and to add positive reviews.

On the App Store, the number of installs that come through a particular search query does more for ranking than anything else. A person types the query, finds the app, and installs it, either straight from the results or after opening the store page. The App Store reads that as a positive signal and moves the app up for that query.

Higher placement means more people see the app when they search, and that brings more organic installs. Because the first three results take such a large share of installs, getting into that range is worth the effort. This is the mechanism behind keyword installs.

Google Play works in a similar way, but it also looks at behavior on the store page, such as visits and how long people stay there.

3. Ratings and reputation

As covered above, ratings and reviews have a strong effect on ranking. A rating can drop for reasons that have little to do with the app itself: a bug in a release, a mistake in the content, users misreading what the app does. Music and video services, for instance, often collect one- and two-star ratings simply because someone did not like a song or a film.

A brand new app has a different problem: it has no rating at all. Ratings from people who install the app through a campaign can close that gap faster. On the App Store, Rankforge offers them as an add-on to live installs.

The App Store and Google Play calculate ratings differently, but both are strict about which ones they publish. A rating left right after the install usually does not count. The ratings that stay are the ones left after someone has installed the app, used it for a while, and come back to it on the following days.

4. Advertising

Paid ads are one of the main engines of app promotion, and it pays to test as many channels as you can. Ads inside the stores and inside other apps work especially well, above all in apps your future users already spend time in.

These are the formats worth looking at.

Ads inside the stores

Apple Search Ads (ASA) is Apple's own tool for promoting iOS apps in the App Store. The ads show up at the top of App Store search when someone looks for a word or phrase.

Here is how it works:

• Keywords. The developer picks keywords related to the app. When someone searches for one of them, the ad appears at the top of the results.
• Auction. Each search for the app's keyword starts an auction, and advertisers compete for the slot based on click rates and how relevant the keyword is.
• Relevance. Apple uses several algorithms to judge relevance. The more of the app's keywords pass Apple's quality bar, the more often the ad gets shown.
• The ad itself. Developers put the ad together from the app's title, description, icon, and screenshots, and that is what appears in search.

For Android apps, Google's ad tools matter a great deal because one campaign can run across Google Search, YouTube, and Google Play at the same time. Each of these offers banners, video, teasers, and other formats, and media buyers (the people who purchase app advertising professionally) choose which format fits.

Ads inside other apps

In-app ads reach people inside the apps they already use, which makes it possible to target groups that are likely to care about your product. AppLovin, AdMob, IronSource, Unity Ads, and Facebook Audience Network are among the networks that offer tools to run and tune these campaigns.

5. Social media

• Paid targeting

Social networks have grown into a large source of app traffic. Their reach is wide and their targeting is precise, so you can find almost any audience and pay for users who will take a specific step, such as signing up or making a purchase. For promotion outside a single country, the usual set is Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram, together with Google's ad platform.

• Social media marketing (SMM)

SMM raises awareness of the brand and brings in organic downloads. It is also a direct line to your audience: on your page you can talk to potential users, answer their questions, reply to comments, and pick up their ideas. Over time that builds loyalty and a closer relationship with the people who use the app.

6. The app's website

Search engines are still a large source of traffic, and Google is often the simplest place to reach the people you want. Organic search remains the biggest promotion channel of all.

This is where classic SEO comes in, and the path to the user varies. In some niches a single landing page for the app is enough. In others you will need to work with review and listing sites that publish rankings of apps.

App Indexing, which connects a website to a mobile app, is worth a look too. It exists on both Android and iOS and is simple in principle: when someone searches on a phone and a result belongs to the site linked to your app, the system offers to install or open the app right away. It also lets you surface the relevant content inside the app itself.

7. PR

PR and word of mouth can turn out to be where most new visitors come from. Options include working with bloggers, putting QR codes on banners and signage, showing up at exhibitions, and getting into ratings and top lists. It takes a lot of effort, and the return can be large.

Promoting games

Mobile games are an extremely competitive market. Most new players never pay for anything, which makes acquiring them hard for any studio.

A few tips for game marketing:

• Do not pitch the game to everyone. Promotion works when you know exactly who you are talking to: their age and background, how they live, when and where they play, which sites they visit. The sharper that picture, the easier it is to target campaigns and the more players they bring in.
• Study the competition. Competitors who already target the same players show you a lot about them. Looking at what they do helps you choose a starting strategy, see the difficulties ahead, try new approaches, and improve how you work.
• Build a strong landing page. A creative, mobile-friendly page that shows the game at its most appealing supports every other channel. It may feel minor at the start, but it works as your business card and pulls players in.
• Work on the store page. ASO matters a lot for games. The higher a game sits in search and in the charts, the more players find it. The work is iterative and differs between iOS and Android, and a studio that neglects it loses a lot of potential players.
• Paid promotion. When the landing page, store pages, social accounts, videos, and promo materials are ready, you can start buying users. Banner ads on networks and social media are only one option. Reviews on well-known app and game sites, content marketing, and cross-promotion can all have a real effect on results.

Measuring progress and planning what comes next

User acquisition is usually the main goal of an ad campaign, but judging progress and planning ahead takes more than one number. "How many users did I get?" is the obvious question, and it says little about how the app performs or whether the promotion paid off. Track these as well:

• Click-through rate (CTR). The share of people who clicked your ad out of everyone who saw it. A high CTR usually means the ad catches attention and makes people want to find out more.
• Cost per install (CPI). What you pay on average for a user who clicks the ad and installs the app. It shows how cost-efficient the campaign is.
• Cost per acquisition (CPA). Like CPI, but counted against an action you define, such as a purchase or finishing a level. It gives a finer view of whether the ads drive the behavior you want.
• Average revenue per user (ARPU). How much revenue one user brings in on average, and so how well you monetize your audience.
• Retention and churn. Retention is how many users keep using the app over time, churn is how many drop off. High retention with low churn usually means people get value from the app and stay engaged.
• Uninstalls. How often people delete the app. A high rate can point to problems with performance or the user experience.
• Conversion. How many users complete a target action, such as buying something or subscribing. When conversion is high, the app is usually doing a good job of leading people to that action.

Add customer lifetime value (LTV) to that list. It is the total profit a user brings over the whole time they use the app, and it shows how the app has performed over a longer period.

A promotion plan usually mixes several methods: press releases, media reviews, influencers, SMM, and work on the store pages and store search themselves. Your metrics and user feedback tell you which of these work and where to change course. And the app itself has to be good, because every channel above sends people to it.