Orbit app breaks Top 100 in App Store via mobile advertising

By Giselle Tsirulnik

January 20, 2010

Orbit's landing page

An advertising campaign for the Orbit Social Phone Book succeeded in getting the application into the Top 75 slot in the Apple App Store in under two weeks.

The ad campaign is further confirmation of the potential of mobile advertising in affecting App Store rankings. Trilibis’ Orbit Media subsidiary marketed the application with WDA, with promotional ads running on ad networks Millennial Media, Quattro Wireless, AdMob and Jumptap.

“Initial trials of Orbit were very promising, and we wanted to give it every effort to succeed,” said Christine Loredo, vice president of marketing at Orbit, San Mateo, CA. “With well over 2,000 social networking applications in the Apple App Store, the competition is fierce.

“Still, we felt we could break the top 100 in our category out of the gate with a well-executed marketing campaign that reached users where they would be using the app – on their iPhone,” she said.

Orbit was able to exceed its objective, reaching No. 61 in the social networking category before it ended its marketing campaign.

Out of orbit
The application was downloaded by thousands of users, many of whom reviewed it. Orbit plans to take this information directly into its next version of the application.

The following is the creative text used for the campaign:

The Social Phone Book. Orbit.
Tone It Down With Orbit The Social Phone Book
All Your Social Networks in One Place
Get The Social Phone Book. Free.
New Year's Res: Keep Friends Close
Tone down your social network-Orbit

Here are the actual banners that were used in the campaign, created by WDA:

This is the landing page:

Lowdown on downloads
When starting the campaign, the Orbit application was seeing about 40 downloads per day. The ad campaign increased downloads to 200 per day, on average, at about a $2 CPA.

The highest downloads during the campaign peaked at 1,300. WDA noticed that downloads spiked on days when consumers posted good reviews of the application. Downloads were down on days when reviews were bad.

Per WDA, the keys to making this campaign successful were real-time download and registration information, multiple ad networks and many ad variations.

“We could instantly see what was leading to conversions,” said Brennan Hayden, vice president of WDA, East Lansing, MI. “We were also able to throttle traffic very precisely to hit specific download targets and CPAs.

“Trilibis is a fantastic client, very receptive and supportive,” he said. “And Orbit is a tremendous new product with a lot of promise. That combination makes our job as an app marketer easy and very exciting.”