Mobile marketing platform TUNE released a new report, which analyzed how paid application installs affect organic app installs. The report showed that paid app installs can boost organic app installs by 1.5 times across all app categories, and that depending on the specific app category, the boost can be as high as 16.6 times.
In the context of this report, TUNE defined an organic install as one that is “not primarily motivated and facilitated by a paid ad.” These organic installs can come from direct searches on app stores, unpaid links on social media and other channels.

Based on its data, TUNE determined the percentage of app installs that result from paid app install campaigns to be “about 10 percent.” By comparison, Apple has said “over 65 percent of [iOS] downloads come directly from searches on the App Store.” TUNE analyzed “the relationship between paid and organic installs” for thousands of mobile publishers over a period of 245 days, and it found that for each paid install an app receives, it receives an average of 1.5 additional organic installs.
TUNE broke this figure down by operating system and app category, and it found that on Android, transportation apps see the highest boost to organic installs for each paid install, at 16.6 times. Transportation apps were followed by racing games and word games, which receive boosts of 13.3 times and 7.2 times, respectively.
On iOS, games see the largest boost ...