What is the cheapest way to promote a mobile app?

App store optimisation, because it costs time rather than money and keeps working after you stop. The cheapest paid improvement is usually not a channel at all but fixing link delivery, since it raises the yield of traffic you already pay for.

How long does app promotion take to work?

Paid channels produce installs the same day and tell you very little for the first two weeks. ASO takes four to twelve weeks to move. Content and SEO take three to six months. Plan the budget so the slow channels are already running while the fast ones are being tested.

Why do my ad clicks not turn into installs?

Three usual causes, in order of frequency: the link never reached the store because it was opened inside a social app's browser, the store listing does not convert, or the traffic was not the audience you think you bought. Check them in that order, because the first is mechanical and the other two are judgement calls.

Do I need an app marketing agency?

Not at the start. An agency is worth paying once you have a working delivery path, a known cost per install and a budget large enough that a percentage improvement exceeds their fee. Before that you are paying someone to discover your baseline for you.

How to promote a mobile app

Most guides give you the same eight channels. Fewer mention that a share of everything you send through them never reaches the store at all, which changes the arithmetic on all eight.

9 August 2026 · PAD team

The channels, honestly ranked

There are not many ways to get a stranger to install an app. Here they are, with what each actually costs before anyone talks about creative.

Channel	Cost shape	Speed	Main risk
App store search (ASO)	time, ongoing	slow, 4-12 weeks	you compete on a fixed keyword surface
Paid social (Meta, TikTok)	money, per click	immediate	you pay for taps, not arrivals
Google App campaigns	money, per install	immediate	little control over placement
Influencers and creators	money or product	days	one post, one spike, no compounding
Content and SEO	time, compounding	very slow	irrelevant traffic if targeted badly
Community and forums	time, reputation	days	removal if you look promotional
Press and launch sites	time	one day	a spike that does not repeat
Referral inside the app	engineering	slow	needs an audience to start

Nothing here is new. What most channel lists leave out is that the arrow from channel to store has a failure rate, and on iOS it is not small.

The step between the tap and the store

Every one of those channels ends the same way: someone taps a link that points at the App Store or Google Play. On desktop that always works. Inside a social app on iPhone it frequently does not.

Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and the rest open links in a browser they built and control, not in Safari. Apple answers any request to apps.apple.com with a redirect into a custom scheme:

→ 301 Moved Permanently
  Location: itms-appss://apps.apple.com/app/id123456789

Safari treats that as an instruction to hand off to the App Store. An in-app browser has no handler for the scheme, so navigation simply stops. The user gets a white screen and no error message, and your analytics record a successful click.

How much traffic this concerns

Measured on 21,000 taps routed between 3 and 9 August 2026, 19,381 came from inside a social app, and 95.6% of those were on iOS. In other words, for a typical app promoted on Instagram and Facebook, the overwhelming majority of your paid and organic taps land in exactly the environment where a plain store link is unreliable.

That is not a rounding error to correct later. It sits between you and every channel in the table above.

The order to do things in

Fix delivery first. It is the cheapest thing on this list and it multiplies everything else.
Then ASO, because it is free and compounds while you do the rest.
Then one paid channel, properly, rather than three badly.
Then creators, once you know your cost per install and can tell whether a post beat it.
Then content, which pays back in month four and not before.

The sequence matters more than the list. Buying traffic before delivery works means paying full price for a share of white screens, and buying creators before you know your baseline means having no way to judge whether the post was good.

What to measure

Two numbers tell you whether promotion is working, and neither is downloads.

Metric	Why it matters
Click to install rate, per source	catches delivery failure before it eats a month of budget
Day 7 retention, per source	tells you which channel brings people who stay

If the first number is much worse on one source than another with identical creative, look at delivery before you blame the audience. That difference is usually mechanical.

A short answer, if you want one

Promoting an app well comes down to a link that works everywhere and a store listing you keep improving, with one paid channel you understand properly on top. Everything else is an addition to that, not a substitute for it.

Delivery is the one item on that list you can fix this afternoon.

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