How we delivered 18,252 installs in 7 months to a brand new app without ads

The client

VPNSumo is a Virtual Private Network (VPN) technology provider. The operate on a freemium model which gives users the protection of a VPN on all of their devices. The VPN space is highly competitive with many offerings.

The objective

Bring VPNSumo’s new app into the very crowded market place and drive top-of-funnel activity to drive traffic to the website, get people using the app.

Our approach

First we created personas of the target demographic and performed competitive analysis. The output of this was our keyword strategy. Since we know how competitive the search engine rankings were for some of the obvious choices (e.g. “vpn”) we decided to pursue a long-tail keyword strategy. This meant going after things like “free vpn chrome” as well as persona-driven keywords such as “unblock websites” which saw high traffic on search engines and we felt we could more quickly achieve higher rankings on compared to a “hail mary” approach of working on trying to rank for “vpn” which might not pay off until years down the line.

Next we launched an SEO optimized website and created the content that directly mapped to our keywords. The result here was that we grew the organic traffic from nothing to significant traffic for each dedicated landing page.

An example of one of the keyword oriented landing pages growing organic traffic from 0.

The end result is us building a website and taking it from 0 traffic to almost 9,000 unique visitors a month in only 7 months and without spending a penny on paid advertising or digital ads.

0 to 9,000 unique visitors in 7 months organically

The remainder of the install strategy was performed via App Store Optimization. We knew that everyone was focused on winning the SEO battle for the “vpn” keyword on Google, but less attention was being paid on the app stores. We treated the app stores as another search engine (because they are) and optimized listings for discovery via in-app store searches. The end result being that we received more traffic to the app store listing than the website.