After some tough experience on boost campaigns in Google Play, I decided to make a comparison between Google Play and App Store ranking algorithms.
I believe every app marketer has a sense that Google is a little bit stable against ad campaigns. That is why it is harder to boost your app ranking in Google Play than App Store.
But how hard it is?
To answer this question I looked at the ranking variations of well-known apps some of which are selected as the top advertisers on the Facebook(I added a local app Hopi which is known to be the top advertiser in Turkish market).
With the great advertising budgets of those apps, how did those apps move within the two app markets?
Here is the answer:
Max daily step is the ranking difference between two adjacent days.
Velocity is the total ranking change within a month divided by number of days. For example; Tinder moved at a speed of 7 ranks/day in the last month..
The data gives us 4 important things in summary:
1) It is very hard to boost an App in Google Play. On the other hand boost campaigns work very well in App Store.
2) When you achieved a good ranking in Google Play, it also takes a while to lose your rank. On the other hand you must keep your downloads steady in order not to loose your rank in App Store.
3)Velocity of an app gives an estimation in your ad budget to get your desired ranking. With a correct ad management it is not hard to move your app 16 ranks per day in App Store on average. However App velocity is very low in Google Play. So you have to expand your overall budget to a larger period.
4) Google Play does not like advertisers.
Thanks.
