Is it worth it to buy app downloads on Fiverr?

Are you considering buying downloads for your app on Fiverr?

Don’t know what I’m talking about? Yes, you can actually buy app downloads on Fiverr for as little as $0.05 per-install.

However, is this worth it? Will it help increase your App Store ranking or make a noticeable impact on your ASO?

Let’s take a look at a couple of experiments that I ran buying downloads on Fiverr.

Impact on App Store Rankings

Short answer: no impact whatsoever.

First let me show you a few campaigns that we ran for a client that did have a major impact on App Store rankings. Our client hired us to help with app promotion for an app update.

As you can see from the chart below, you can see that running a PR, influencer marketing and paid-to-free campaign all contributed to the app increasing in rank to as high as #154 in the US Action and #162 Arcade categories.

For this one week span, the app averaged about 2K downloads a day with the biggest days occurring during the influencer and paid-to-free campaigns.

What happened with the Fiverr downloads?
So as a mad app marketing scientist, I wanted to see if buying 3,000 downloads through Fiverr would have any impact on App Store rankings.

As you can see my app, Spaceman Dodgeball, didn’t make a dent in the App Store rankings with the Fiverr downloads.

Why no impact?
If you dig into the downloads a bit deeper you will find that most of the downloads came through the desktop.

Here are my learnings / assumptions

1. Fiverr downloads maybe generated through the use of automated bots or scripts.
2. Desktop downloads have little to no impact on Apple’s App Store Ranking algorithm.

I will be running a test in the future to see if we can drive more device downloads through Fiverr and what that will do to the App Store rankings. My guess is that it will have a greater impact than desktop downloads.

Impact on App Store Optimization

Short answer: YES!

I ran another test to see if we could increase keyword rankings by running a slightly modified campaign. I had my Fiverr contact have users or bots (however he’s doing it) search for a keyword before downloading the app.

We found that we were able to climb from the #2 spot to #1 during this campaign. To keep my client’s privacy I won’t share the keyword or the app name.

Unfortunately, after the campaign we went back to being the #2 search result. The good news is that we are #2 for a pretty competitive keyword even though there are similar apps that were launched a lot earlier.

I also noticed that we were able to achieve the #1 spot during our influencer campaign where we became a trending search term. The crazy thing was that we were actually ranked #2 for the keyword that was trending and after a day overtook the #1 app. I’m assuming this happened because we were sharing screenshots of our app so users downloading our app instead of the competitor app.

Here are my learnings / assumptions:

1. Having users search for the keyword along with the acceleration in downloads from Fiverr helped us achieve the #1 spot albeit short lived.
2. Ranking #2 for a trending search term did NOT hurt downloads as I originally thought it would and actually helped us achieve the #1 spot albeit short lived again.
3. Downloads within the past 24 hours factor into keyword rankings, so don’t sweat it if you’re being beat for a few days.

Next time, I’d like to double up this Fiverr ASO strategy with a paid to free campaign to have a couple of days of 2–3K daily downloads. I believe this will help an app stay in the top spot for a longer period of time and even propel it into the top spot.

We’ll see…

Am I stupid?

What do you think? Do you have an experience you can share about buying downloads on Fiverr?

Have you tried another type of burst campaign and want to share your results with me? Email me any time steve at appmasters dot co and let’s talk!

Also, if you think my assumptions are way off either email me or leave a comment below. I can take it, I’m a big boy (or so my mommy tells me).