Last year, Google presented a plan to boost app installs which—among other things—included promoting apps with simple ads. While the Mountain View-based tech giant offers plenty of ways for promoting apps to developers, it seems that its general strategy has lately been spot-on as Google has just announced that its customers managed to achieve three billion installs for their apps using the company’s ad network. Even more impressive than that number is the fact that one-third of it was achieved in the last four months alone. So, since May of this year, Google ads were directly responsible for a billion app installs.
However, as Google didn’t comment on the sustainability of this number, several industry experts instantly became skeptical and started poking around a bit more. As it turns out, the Universal App Campaign tool launched by Google last year has also recently become available to advertisers targeting iOS devices. How recently? You’ve guessed it – this May. In other words, the aforementioned rise of app installs correlates with the rising size of Google’s potential customers. And in this case, correlation almost certainly equals causation. To put it simply, it’s unlikely Google will boast about a billion of additional app installs by January of 2017.
That isn’t to say this accomplishment isn’t praise-worthy. To put things into context, Facebook recently announced that its app promotion network resulted in two billion installs as of this April. So, Google was already outperforming its biggest advertising competitor even back then and has just orchestrated a huge boost to its app promotion business. Despite the fact that the app industry itself isn’t growing as fast as it used to in terms of installs, there’s still plenty of money to be made from app advertising. In fact, precisely because consumers stopped downloading everything and anything to their smartphones on their own, ad giants like Google and Facebook have more customers willing to pay money to promote their apps. In fact, latest estimates suggest that the app advertising business will reach $7 billion in revenue by 2020, so it’s no wonder that Google is proudly boasting about the aforementioned number of recent app installs as the thereof shows that the Mountain View tech giant is still the undisputed king of the advertising industry.