In this article we will describe in detail how we managed to develop an application dedicated to the hyped topic and to bring it to the TOP of Google Play and App Store for the queries “elections” and “elections 2018”.
In early January it was obvious that the most popular of the upcoming topics would be “Presidential elections”. Debates, all sorts of talk shows and provocations will begin, which will encourage people to take an interest in politics.
What were the goals
1) Develop an application in a short period of time
2) Protect the application from fraud as much as possible, in order to simultaneously obtain objective information about the candidates’ ratings.
4) Introduce self-promotion functions into the application.
5) Bringing it to the top of Google Play and App Store for key search queries.
Application development
Since we were not particularly planning to monetize the applications. It was very important to spend a minimum of time on development. The server was written on Node Js + Monga DB in a week. Native development of Android and iOS applications took a little more than 1 week in total.
Protection from falsification and cheating
Protection from cheating of votes is built as follows. Authorization is performed through a VKontakte account. After successful authorization, we receive a token, the server checks it for validity. If it is valid, then we check whether this user had votes by his ID. Then we offer to vote.
How can you bypass our system? The first way is to order tasks on some exchange. There is no way to protect yourself from such a case. But the attackers will have to spend a lot of money for this, but if someone starts to cheat votes like this, then the installations will also be cheated. Since any installation raises the app rating. Then our app will have more organic traffic and this cheating will dissolve in the general flow. It turns out that this method is almost pointless.
The second way is to sniff all the necessary requests, learn how to fake them, buy a database of fake accounts, buy a lot of proxy servers so that the IP address is not repeated and finally write a script that will tie it all together and start to cheat votes.
Theoretically, you can train a neural network that would check each vote in the database for fakeness and motivation. In this case, no cheating will be scary.
Self-promotion features
The most important feature that helps the application to promote itself is the motivation to leave an advertising post on its page. After the user votes, a screen appears with two buttons “Leave a post” and “Buy PRO”.
Both of these buttons allow a person to take full advantage of the application. View results and detailed statistics.
At the moment, almost 8,000 reposts have been left. And the link from the repost, depending on the operating system, leads to Google Play or the App Store.
Also, 2 pop-ups were added to the application. The first one offers to join the group, and the second one asks about the attitude towards the application. If the user rates it positively, then we redirect him to the page for writing reviews.
Bringing to the top of Google Play and App Store by queries
The release of the applications was approximately at the beginning of February. In a couple of weeks, we were able to bring to the top 1 of Google Play and App Store by key search queries “Elections” and “Elections 2018” to first place, despite a large number of competitors.
On Google Play and App Store, a total of about 10,000 installations were uploaded. Mainly for the queries “Elections” and “Elections 2018”. A small part of the installations were for the queries “Putin” and “Navalny”, but it was not possible to rise too high for them, since these words were not in the name of the application. A large part of the installations went to Google Play, in the App Store the promotion was much easier.
What results were obtained
A small disappointment came when we promoted the application to the limit for key queries. We received only 500 installations per day for both applications. But on election day (March 18, 2018), Google Analytics was very encouraging. Showing a huge jump in activity. Both applications were downloaded on that day by about 9,000 new unique users (5,000 Android and 4 iOS). This was almost as much as for the rest of the time.
As a result, more than 18,000 people voted in our application. You can study the electorate of each candidate in detail. Apply filters by gender, age, country and city. If you want to play around, here is the link.
The data in our application significantly differs in indicators from the official ones. This discrepancy can be explained by the fact that our app was used by a younger audience, which is more critical of the current government. You can see that the first 4 places are the same. Let’s hope that in the next elections they will save on paper and get by with just our app 🙂
Thank you all for your attention and wish you a successful promotion!
If you have any questions, write to Telegram.