How to Take Advantage of Google Promotional Content

Have you ever wondered how you can use Google’s promotional content to promote your app? Perhaps, you might have just heard about promotional content and are now trying to learn more about it. Thankfully, you’re on the right track. In this post, we are going to deep dive into what Google promotional content is all about and how you can fully take advantage of it!

What is promotional content on Google Play?

Promotional content is a marketing feature that enables you to increase people’s awareness of your app by promoting new and time-sensitive content on Google Play. This feature could play a huge role in your marketing campaign, as it helps you increase not just impression rates but also conversion rates.

In a nutshell, promotional content helps you to:

• Promote your app to non-users, engage them, and eventually lead them into downloading your app.
• Reconnect with previous users and persuade them to reinstall your app.
• Make people aware of your new and current offers and content.
• Regularly running promotional content tells Google Play that you’re updating your app and you’re investing in it in a timely manner. This helps Google Play to consider your app in making it more popular in their algorithm.
• Submitting promotional content opens the opportunity for Google Play to feature your content across the platform, thereby increasing your chances of getting more impressions.

Perhaps the most important benefit of promotional content is its contribution to your App Store Optimization (ASO) efforts. Promotional content improves your app’s organic search ranking, which leads to better ASO.

Types of content you can feature with promotional content

Promotional content allows you to promote the following:

• Offers: promote rewards, in-app discounts, and bonuses.
• Time-limited events: use promotional content when you you’re running competitions (where your users play against each other for rankings and rewards), challenges (where your users try to achieve a specific goal), real-time events (sports matches, concerts, and other live streaming content), and special events (other types of events that don’t fit in other categories).
• Major updates: promotional content is a perfect tool as well for new features, such as a significant update or announcement. Major updates also include newly created content such as movies, performances, music, on-demand shows, characters, and game levels.
• Pre-registration updates: if you’re running a pre-registration campaign and you want to further engage your users, use promotional content to tell them about new features, milestone progress, instant app demos, and global release announcements. 

Where is promotional content displayed on Google Play?

Promotional content is a great way to increase your app’s visibility. Google Play may display your promotional content on the following:

Source

• Store listing of your app
• Homepage
• Search results

Qualify for Google Play Premium growth tools

Not everyone can use promotional content. You need to first qualify for it. Promotional content is part of Google Play Premium growth tools. So, if you qualify, you will not only be able to use promotional content but also an increased number of custom store listings (from 50, you can have 100). Moreover, you’ll be able to promote your game with YouTube videos on Google Play.

So, how do you qualify for Google Play Premium growth tools and, therefore, promotional content? You need to meet Google’s eligibility criteria. Generally speaking, you need to be in good standing with Google Play.

Now, the eligibility criteria would depend on the type of app or game you have. Moreover, your app should be included in a supported category, which includes the following:

• Business
• Dating
• Tools
• Finance
• Parenting
• Medical
• News
• Casino
• Video players

Depending on your app, you need to meet certain thresholds based on your monthly average users (MAU), your income per month, and others. You can check Google Play’s full explanation of the eligibility criteria and thresholds. Google regularly checks for qualifying titles and apps. If you meet all the criteria, you will find the promotional content option in your Play console.

How to take advantage of Google Play promotional content?

As great as promotional content is, it will not automatically help if you don’t know how to use it. Thus, it’s a must that you have the right expertise to maximize results. So, here are some of the best practices you should follow:

1. Follow content requirements and recommendations

Google Play wants to promote high-quality content not just for app marketers but for the benefit of users as well. This means that when you submit promotional content, Google checks whether you meet content requirements and recommendations.

This is a huge topic, so you need to review Google’s guidelines. Aside from that, it’s worth noting some of the most common reasons promotional content is rejected:

• The tagline is unclear about what you are offering.
• Promotional content isn’t something new or noteworthy.
• Promotional content is not applicable to all users, and if it is not, the requirements are not clearly described.
• Promotional content comes with inappropriate images, texts, videos, and trademarked characters and logos.
• Promotional content looks unprofessional in appearance.
• The promotional content isn’t localized properly.
• The developer chose the wrong promotional content type.
• The promotional content includes restricted content that deliberately scares, shocks, upsets, or disgusts users.
• The promotional content includes sexually explicit content or nudity. 

2. Include the necessary information in your promotional content

You need to provide accurate details and make sure that you have all the crucial information about your promotional content. Here are a few other things you need to know:

• Explain what is new. Remember, promotional content is about the latest updates about your app. So, you should clearly and concisely describe the exact new content you’re trying to promote.
• Tell the users about the benefits. Include an explanation of the selling points of your new content and why users should care about it. When users read your tagline and description, they should immediately understand what benefits you are offering.
• Include instructions on how to participate. Tell your users the exact steps for how they can access your new content, use the new feature, participate in your event, or receive their rewards.

3. Ensure content quality

Google Play cares a lot about user experience. Therefore, your promotional content must contribute to the overall great experience of users when they are on Google Play. The best way Google Play ensures this is to check your promotional content for quality.

With this in mind, you need to provide promotional content that is clear, relevant, professional, useful, and easy to understand.

Here’s a quick overview of what you should do with each element of your promotional content:

• Tagline: taglines should be clear, accurate, and concise (up to 80 characters). It should quickly communicate what your specific offer is, the value your users will receive from your content, and the limited-time nature of your offer.
• Description: you can write up to 500 characters for your description. This is where you can further explain your selling points or the benefits to your users. Tell as well how they can use your offer. No need to mention the same message you mentioned in the tagline.
• Image: submit an image in JPG or 24-bit PNG format. It should use a 16:9 aspect ratio and a size of 1920 x 1080 pixels. Remember to place the most important elements within the safe zone. Avoid adding text in your images or using the same images for various promotional content.

• Animated assets: this should follow the required format, which is the Lottie Animation. The dimension is a 16:9 aspect ratio, and the file size should not exceed 200 KB. Remember to edit the animation in such a way that it loops seamlessly and should only be 6 seconds maximum in length. Establish a visually appealing presentation by using the same dominant colors all throughout your promotional image and animation.
• Video: remember to disable ads for your featured video. Don’t use videos with copyrighted content, and set it in portrait orientation. Choose a video that specifically helps your users to visualize your promotional content.

4. Indicate your most important events

You can have multiple promotional content pieces going live on Google Play. Thus, you need to indicate which of them Google Play should prioritize.

Source

When setting up your promotional content, there’s an option where you can indicate the priority number, between 1 and 3, where 1 is the highest priority. This allows you to choose the most impactful and important promotional content as your top priority.

5. Localize your promotional content

It is no secret that localization is one of the best keys to accessing new markets. Thankfully, even promotional content can be localized.

Source

If you are trying to target a specific country, then be sure to select it when setting up promotional content. Along with that, you need to provide localized images, texts, and other media to ensure market congruency. You can target multiple countries, but make sure you provide localized details in each relevant language.

6. Measure promotional content performance

Part of the best practices for promotional content is measuring how it performs. You can go to Play Console’s performance reports to check how your promotional content is doing. The performance report will not only give you reporting metrics but also show you how you can improve your promotional content.

You can generate reports for each promotional content. Performance reports can show you details about:

• Installs
• Crashes
• Subscriptions
• Ratings
• Buyers
• Retained installers
• Subscribers

To access your reports, simply follow these steps: Go to Promotional content reports page > Grow > Store performance > Promotional content reports.

Source

Take advantage of promotional content now!

Promotional content is just one of the things that makes you shine in the middle of a sea of apps in Google Play. When done right, it can be the greatest key to getting more downloads and sales. However, there are just so many things to learn before you can truly take advantage of promotional content.

Thankfully, you don’t have to go solo in your app marketing. ShyftUp is here for you.

ShyftUp is among the leading user acquisition agencies in the world that specialize in helping clients thrive and prosper in app stores. They have the necessary expertise, tools, and experience to help you start with promotional content and support your ASO marketing campaigns.

Give them a call today, and you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how they can bring your app to the next level of success!