Who is this post for?
10,000 downloads, is it a lot?
To be perfectly honest, it is very little. If my apps were paid apps, then of course 10,000 purchases wouldn’t be so bad, but all my apps are free with ads. Furthermore, I don’t use too aggressive ad strategy – usually a banner and one video ad that comes up from time to time.
The thing is, looking solely on the number of downloads is a fools game. It’s not really about the number of downloads – that’s the incorrect KPI to be monitoring. What you really need is active users who actually use the app, preferably every day.
With this post I wanted to talk about my failures when it comes to understanding app marketing and what I’ve learned from it so far.
“1,000, 10,000, 100,000 or even a million downloads – it doesn’t matter if none of them use your app more than once a day.”
Active users
What I noticed is when using Google Ads to promote my apps, I get quite a lot of downloads, a few hundred every day. It’s actually quite satisfying to see every day the green numbers going up. It’s kind of addictive really. See an example from one of my apps:
Forgive me for the Polish translation, but basically what you see above is a time series graph that shows daily ‘acquired devices’ or simply, downloads. It shows in the peak moment I had 105 in a day. Seems like quite a nice score, over 100 downloads per day. I would understand that around 100 people from all over the world felt interested enough with my apps and decided to give it a try. But the confusing bit is that I haven’t seen any activity in the apps, out of all the 10k users, only one actually created an account in my Auth0 system. This made me wonder, are these numbers fake in some way or maybe people when seeing some cool video ads just mindlessly download the thing but never use it? To be honest, I cannot answer it and perhaps that is my first failure.
“Explore other ways of building your community than just banner and video ads… you might get downloads from very far away places that simply seem suspicious…”
How can I know if users are active?
This is my second failure. I haven’t implemented early enough any analytical service (like Google Analytics) to help me really track what the users are doing. It’s one of the most important things to monitor early on – how do people really use your app? Where they are stuck? Do they actually finish the happy flows / game levels? Or do they abandon them half way? The most relevant statistics to capture are:
- Number of games / rounds finished / flows completed – depending on your app different ‘milestone’ might apply. In my Event Calculator app for example I am counting how many times an event was settled.
- Number of games / flows started – this can be naturally compared with the first one to see how many flows / rounds / games have actually been completed.
- Average game / round time – more related to gaming apps, but still valid to see how much time each level takes.
- Types of games / flows started – to really see what functionalities are used. This is very important to see on which functionality the user should focus on.
- Number of abandoned games / flows – how many times the user interrupted the flow or game? This gives you an indication that maybe a game level is too hard or the flow is too complicated?
- Times shared with others – if your app have some social aspects like sharing your game result or other information, it’s worth counting how many time this was actually used. If the users are shy to use the share functionality, maybe the content is not rich enough or maybe it’s not that valuable.
- Overall feedback – for this better use a dedicated review mechanism, Google Analytics is not a qualitative feedback gathering system. You can of course use Google Play / app store review and make a popup for the user from time to time (like after a game round or finishing a flow) and ask for a review but be careful here. If the user is not happy he will give a bad review. One good practice I heard about and I’m using is to implement your custom feedback – ask first the user “Do you like using our app?” and add some smiley faces. If the user selects any “non-happy” smiley, instead of showing the store review popup, show another one to provide text feedback – you can save that in your server / cloud repository and review it manually. If the user chooses a happy smiley – show the store review popup.
“Gather usage statistics (with consent) from the very beginning. Ask users for written feedback, collect it and improve upon it.”
I’m sure you can come up with more KPIs to watch, but the most important lesson I had to learn early on – user statistics are critical for improving your apps. Just make sure you ask the user for consent to gather anonymous statistics (and make sure they are really anonymous).
How to really get active users?
If I knew the perfect answer to this question, I would most likely already reach my goal of having popular apps somewhere in top rankings with enough money to resign from my corporate job. Here’s a bunch of ideas that seem to be improving my targeting, although I admit, coming up with ideas on how to find active users is my third failure. I must work a bit harder on these points for myself as well…
- Don’t rely on random ads – they boost the traffic in your store page and website, but very often these are random or confused people (or maybe bots, who knows?). They might not even want to download the app but somehow got lost in the Internet.
- If you rely on ads, target them properly – by default, Google ads tries to segment your audience in some way, but very often it just goes to random people who are not the preferred target. I see a lot of value of doing the advertising yourself in different community channels in Reddit, Facebook or Discord. Of course, it looks a bit like spamming, but if done right – you get people that are actually interested in your app.
- Take your time to educate yourself how ads work – I admit, I failed here quite a lot. I paid a lot for the ads and I did reach the 10k downloads, but in the end this means almost nothing. At this point, the best suggestion I can give is to really find a proper book or a guide on how to properly market an app. Once I find it, I’ll for sure update the blog post.
“Marketing is where I failed the most. I created visual ads, even videos, yet somehow, my revenue did not went up.”
My results so far
I’m going to be fully transparent and share my earnings from ads from the recent month of January 2026. Having around 10k downloads out of which Google Play console tells me there’s maybe around 1-2k active users would make it seem like I should have earned something… Well the reality is quite different.
Look at all the fancy green numbers, it’s almost addicting for me to see so many beautiful green percentages going up… But this means nothing… 25 cents?!
You can see, even with this kind of number of users I have no real earnings (yet). I hope this will change and I plan to do some changes based on all the thing I’ve learned so far, so hopefully my next blog post will be more optimistic.
What is also interesting, as soon as the Google Ad campaign stopped (I had it running for one month), then suddenly any kind of revenue from ads was reduced to zero. It’s like, as soon as I stopped paying for ads, the traffic went back to zero. This still makes me wonder, how do Google Ads really work?
But let’s see what I plan to change:
1. Educate myself on ads and marketing
I made a mistake by thinking it’s so simple. I prepared some banners, texts, a few YouTube videos and then using Google Ads I just launched it for a month with a budget of 5 EUR per day. I saw increase of downloads every day, but they meant nothing. At this point, maybe someone might tell me that 5 EUR a day is nothing and I should have went with 50 EUR per day… but that would make me bankrupt quite fast…
So to really understand my mistakes, I need to do some proper research, find a book, a tutorial or any podcast that explains things in more detail.
2. Believe more in my products
Part of my problem is fear that what I created is awful, ugly and useless. I bet a lot of app creators face the same issue. I use to think that before I started actual play-testing with different people that I knew more (like friends, family) and less (like co-workers, random people I met at parties, etc.). Once I got some hints that maybe what I did is fun and useful, I eliminated a barrier that was blocking me to show-off my apps.
Best tip I can give here, start small, do a lot of playtesting and gather user statistics and feedback. Work your way up to a good point that will motivate you to make a broader promotion of your work.
3. Become a tasteful spammer
It’s very difficult to say this in a positive way, but to really get your stuff out there, you have to become a kind of a spammer. But it cannot be the bad kind of spam of sending random emails with “DoWnLoAd my APPPP!!!”. Prepare a proper post, a nice and professional description, preferably with images or links to videos. Especially important is to keep the marketing alive, so new content (images, videos, posts) have to come frequently (once a week?). Find the right channels and start posting there. Some suggestions:
- Start ‘spamming’ on Reddit channels.
- Start ‘spamming’ on Discord channels.
- Start ‘spamming’ on any other platforms that might promote games (like itch.io, Substack).
- Start ‘spamming’ on social media and share all the posts at least to my friends with the hope of them resharing it.
- Reach out directly to people you know to test the apps.
- At some point, reach out to influencers to playtest the app (my biggest fear at the moment).
- Implement in the apps a popup asking for a review – quite an obvious thing I unfortunately missed to take into account earlier.
- Implement a lot more statistics in the app to really learn where people spend time and what parts they avoid – see the section before.
4. Keep improving based on feedback
You need to brace yourself for a lot of negative feedback. You can absolutely not predict what the users will like and not like. In one of my games, the very first comment and rating I got (4 / 5 stars) was that the game is cool, but it is not bloody enough, even though there’s blood splattering in a lot of places… Still, I’m proud of getting a real rating by someone I don’t know personally, 4/5 is very good for me!
Whatever feedback you might get, in the beginning try to react to all of them, respond politely and promise improvements that are feasible. Of course in case of positive feedback, make sure to thank the reviewer as well. The community will notice if the developer tries to listen to them.
Be prepared that you might receive only bad feedback in the beginning, because it’s quite natural for people to write a review only if something is wrong, doesn’t work or they didn’t like something. Silence usually means things are okay, but not remarkable enough to make an effort of posting a review (hence we need to implement the incentives to add a review, like the in-app popups).
5. Listen to your audience
In the end that’s what we all should do. Almost every developer (big or small) always says that they listen to their fans and make it work. My suggestion here is, if you make such a claim – try to prove it after some time. Everyone can promise this, don’t be a politician and actually keep your promise.
Perhaps you might share your insights and experiences with me? Perhaps you might give me an awful feedback about this blog post and all the actions I have done so far… that’s fine, I am prepared. Maybe I need a cold shower to get me on the right path. I can promise, that whatever tips I might receive, I will diligently analyze them and be thankful for just about anything! I’ll make sure to post proof of me listening to you (unless the feedback would be for me to quit, then I might disagree).
What next?
As always, I will keep going and try to find ways to improve my active users. Maybe I’ll make another post once I reach 100k downloads. I am really hoping that maybe I’m not alone in my predicament and perhaps it is totally normal to not have revenue at 10k downloads. Only time will tell. Thank you for bearing with me and reading my blog post!