Engage app users with timely, regional promotional content

Promotional content cards are self-serve merchandising units on Google Play that feature new and noteworthy content like special offers, limited-time events, new content, and major updates.

These events can help you engage users both inside and outside of your app, driving them to open or reinstall your app, or to take advantage of a discount or special deal. On average, developers who use high priority and high value promotional content see a median increase of 25% for apps and 40% increase for games.

Investing in building & maintaining high quality apps & games and producing high quality content helps make you eligible for featuring opportunities across the Store.

Because Play’s mission is to provide the right content to the right user at the right time, not every user will see the same events. This makes it a powerful tool for regional engagement. For example, featuring events tied to local holidays, new localized content, or regional competitions helps accurately showcase your app’s features and communicate what’s great about your app in ways that are relevant to users in specific regions.

Here are a few examples of how the developers have used promotional content to achieve their regional goals:

Developed by Vidma Video Studio, Vidma Editor helps users express themselves through the art of video editing. Recently, the team used promotional content to highlight strategic seasonal events, focusing on moments that resonated with their users. For example, the team launched a special offer on Mother's Day and introduced new Mother's Day templates, effects, and stickers. They used matching graphics in their promotional content to tie it together, leading to a 770% increase in store listing visitors and a 560% increase in new installs.

Zomato, one of the largest food delivery platforms in India, recently ran a promotional content campaign tied to the Cricket World Cup 2023. Despite already high penetration in India, the campaign led to a 276% uplift to Explore acquisitions during the featuring window resulting in additional 500K+ installs.

Leading e-commerce platform Shopee introduced a quarterly planning session between their regional and local marketing teams to effectively utilize their quota of high-priority events. The team also completed the Play Academy course on promotional content best practices, to continually enhance the quality of their submissions. Shopee continues to deliver hyper-localized experiences by tailoring offers, events, languages and assets across its markets, which resulted in a 29% uplift in Explore acquisitions during the featuring window.

Operating in India’s highly competitive travel booking segment, Goibibo uses promotional content to attract new users with special offers. Recently, they offered new users money off their first hotel booking and highlighted special deals during monsoon season. As a result, they saw a 517% uplift in Explore acquisitions during the featuring window for their new user offer and a 120% uplift for their monsoon offer. Overall, their realized acquisition uplift is 168%.

Graphic design app Canva plans their quarterly promotional content in advance to ensure that it covers a variety of topics, from product updates to offers to celebrating relevant local moments in global markets. They meticulously test different assets and copy to optimize their content, experimenting with different formats, languages, and deep links.

For instance, for Diwali, Canva ran a campaign in India offering 50% off for 3-months of Canva Pro subscription; additionally they also promoted special content and templates especially tailored to the Diwali theme in that time period. For Indonesia’s 78th Independence Day, Canva offered thousands of free & customizable Independence Day templates.

As a result, Canva’s overall visibility on the Store has increased 6x during the featuring window. Moreover, their search conversion rate is also improving and downloads are growing more than 2x year over year.

Pocket FM is an audio series content app that runs promotional content about new releases and updates to ongoing series. Recently, they saw a 123% uplift in Explore acquisitions during the featuring window as a result of three campaigns about new content.

Ready to try promotional content for yourself? Try these best practices to engage your user base:

Learn more about promotional content, or take our free, on-demand Play Academy course for best practices and more.

To learn how promotional content has helped games in this region, check out our other blog post in this series.