Tips and techniques for monetising Android apps

There are multiple strategies in which to monetise your Android app.

1. Free — Ad supported

Often the most common monetisation strategy, which allows you to distribute your application free of charge and take advantage of larger amounts of traffic to make revenue, usually on a pay per click basis. The pay per click revenue is quite small so large number of impressions are required in order to make a respectable return.

The important factor here is striking the right balance between showing as many ads as possible so you can generate good revenue, whilst not detracting from the user experience. This is key as the user needs to remain satisfied with the app so they continue to come back to it.

The typical ad provider is Google’s Admob. This also allows you to cross promote your app by advertising it within other apps.

2. Premium

The simplest and easiest to understand monetisation strategy is to charge up front to use your app. However, it is often the hardest strategy to execute successfully. The clutter of the Google Play store, combined with the psychology of most app users (who are rarely eager to pay the small price of $0.69 for your app) means that this approach can be quite to get downloads.

3. Trial

Premium Apps are often supported by a trial version. This is where the app is given away free in order to create and drive and audience that you can later make money off. The theory is that once you have an gained your users attention, you can charge them to download the full version of the app.

4. Freemium model

Freemium is becoming an increasingly popular method for monetising your app.
An expansion of the trial model, the freemium model, works by giving the whole app away for free but eventually making more money from it by charging for add ons using In-App purchases. Add ons are typically things that will improve user experience, such as unlocking new features, game power-ups or removing adverts.

Another increasingly popular monetisation model is the subscription model. This is where you set up a recurring charge to access the content with you app.

Subscriptions are a natural fit for certain types of content that regularly gets updated, such as newspapers or magazines, or apps providing a regularly updated service. This means you can justify charging the user on a monthly or annual basis.

So having identified the varying strategies, the next step is to determine which is right for you. The following flow chart courtesy of Google can be most useful for this.

Other considerations:

A common theme that is often more prevalent amongst indie developers is simply “just take a chance” and release their app without planning a proper marketing and distribution strategy. Many Android developers still believe that it is “easy” to get an app into the top 25. Yet this approach may have worked well back in say 2009, the game nowadays has changed dramatically. There is far more competition now as more and more developers are creating Android apps.

In our experience, it is better to plan how you intend to market and distribute your app from the start. Consider saving up some budget for this, whether it is to partner with a distribution network, cross promotion or social media promotion.

If nobody is downloading your app, then you will fail to make money from it regardless of your monetisation strategy.

Analytics

Understanding how your users use your app can be key to how you monetise it. For example in Ad supported models you need to consider which pages are best to place adverts on and how visible they need to be. Likewise, In-app purchase options need to present to the user at the right times.

Good analytics will assist with all of this. There exist several analytic packages for Android such as Google Analytics or Flurry.

Try multiple App stores

One of the many good things about creating apps for Android devices are you have multiple app stores in which to distribute your app.

Typically, Android developers release there app to the Google Play store. However, the Amazon App store for Android is increasingly becoming a bigger player. Whilst there are other stores such as getJar or SlideMe that have a good following.