How to promote mobile games and apps on VK (VKontakte)?

Vkontakte is a great source of not only consumers of your goods or services. Here you can also find thousands of users for your app or game on iOS/Android. 42% of VK daily users are mobile-only.

One of the last questions that I have received: how to run an advertising campaign on VK that sends a user directly to AppStore or Google Play?

In this article I describe three ways of app promotion on VK:

1. Advertising using sponsored posts
2. Advertising using myTarget platform
3. Buying posts in groups or fanpages

Method 1. Advertising using sponsored posts

To use this method you will need a fanpage for your app or game. It’s quite simple to create it. Go to the Communities section and click Create community in the top right.

Need help? Text me and I’ll write an article on how to make a fanpage or group.

According to VK’s terms of service to create an advertising campaign your fanpage needs to have detailed information about your business and offer. It has to have at least 10 posts published, but in my experience it is enough to have about five.

I’ve described in my Guide to Vkontakte Advertising the mechanism of creation of the sponsored posts. And here I’d like to briefly describe the process of app advertising on VKontakte.

1. So, after you create a fanpage go to the ad panel and choose Targeted Ads to the left and click Create Ad.
2. Then in the menu select the type of advertising to choose a Community post and click Create post.
3. In the list choose your fanpage and click Continue.
4. And now you should create your post with the link to the app. Add your ad text and insert the link to the application (1), add an image (537×240 px) (2), change the header if required (3) and select the desired call-to-action button, for example, Install or Open (4). And then click Create, and then Proceed. Then all you have to choose the proper targeting settings, send advertising for moderation, pay for the campaign and you are ready to go.

Method 2. Advertising using myTarget

MyTarget (https://target.my.com) advertising platform combines Russian most popular social networks VK and Odnoklassniki and all the projects owned by Mail.Ru Group. So  in total myTarget gives a coverage of about 140 million people .

After registration proceed to create an advertising campaign and then select Mobile App option there:

Insert a link to iTunes or Google Play. And now you can select the ad format:

• mobile ads with pay-per-impressions or clicks
• mobile ads with pay-per-install (CPI)
• several variants of video advertising
• mobile carousel

I clicked the first option. Now you should provide a link to the app and then do all of the standard settings, as in other advertising systems, i.e., title, text, image, targeting options etc.

After making all settings, you will only have to top up your balance. I will describe the campaign settings in myTarget in one of the next articles.

Method 3. Buying posts on VK communities

This method of advertising I described in my guide and here I just want to add that in VK there are a lot of communities with hundreds of thousands of followers. For example, communities about iPhone, or mobile games, useful apps for Android and so on.

The process of buying posts is very simple:

1. You create a post, send it for moderation.
2. Then, after the moderator approved it, you send your offer to one (or more) of the fanpage that you choose.
3. The owner of a chosen fanpage publishes your post, as if it were a normal post on his/her fanpage. After 24 hours, the owner has the right to remove your post.

This post in the community will allow you to quickly reach a huge target audience (depending on the number of subscribers), which can give you a sharp increase in clicks and installs of your app.

If you want to have a gradual but constant growth of users of your application, try sponsored posts or using myTarget mobile ads. This way you will be able to control the number of clicks and to disable ads at any time.