25 installs a week, six months, first place
The slowest campaign on this blog. One keyword went from 36th to 10th, another took first place, and a third finished worse than it started.
Put this next to the casino campaign and the pair says most of what we know about this work. That one spent 3,310 installs in a month on high-volume terms and moved nothing. This one spent 1,315 installs across six months and took a keyword to first place.
The campaign
A radio app on Google Play in France. Batches of 25 installs, one batch every week or two, 19 batches on the main keyword. Six months end to end.
That is a fraction of the daily volume most campaigns on this blog run at. It was chosen deliberately: a small app in a category where nobody is buying the top aggressively does not need to force anything.
The high-volume keyword crept
radio is the big generic term in the category. The app started at 36th.
It went to 25 to 28 in the second month, 13 to 16 in the third, and 9 to 11 in the fourth. Roughly 36 to 10 over three months, with no jumps anywhere in the series. Each batch of 25 moved it a little, and the little did not stop adding up.
This is what a low daily volume looks like when it works. Nothing about it would show up as a result in a weekly report, and after four months the app is in the top 10 of the biggest term in its category.
The low-volume keyword took first place
radios en ligne gets very little search traffic. The app started at 29th, reached first or second place by the end of the third month, and held the top 2 for about six weeks after that.
On its own that number is not worth much: a term nobody searches is a term nobody defends. It matters in combination, because the campaign that took it there is the same campaign that was moving radio at the same time, on the same 25 installs at a go.
The keyword that went backwards
radio fm is mid-volume. The app was 42nd at the start and 63rd five months later, after four separate batches aimed at it.
It went down, while two other keywords on the same app, in the same market, on the same schedule, went up. We do not know why. Nothing in the campaign data distinguishes it from the other two.
Every case here has one of these. We have stopped treating it as an anomaly and started treating it as the base rate: some keywords do not respond, and no amount of looking at install counts tells you in advance which ones.
What this case does not show
No organic installs and no revenue. Six months of climbing on the category's main term is exactly the case where the organic number would matter most, and it is the number the platform does not report.
No app name, no purchase cost, no calendar dates. The keywords, the market, and the store are real.
No control. We cannot separate what the campaign did from what the app would have done on its own over six months, and with a run this slow that gap is wider than usual, not narrower.
What we take from it
Volume is not the lever people assume it is. What decided the outcome here, and in every other case on this page, was which keyword was being pushed, not how hard. A term with nobody defending it moves on 25 installs at a time. A term with money behind it does not move on 1,260.