Cross-Promotion in Apps

Cross-promotion in apps is the practice of promoting one of your apps to the users of another app you own. A publisher with several apps — say a portfolio of games, or a set of related utilities — uses the audience it already has in one app to drive awareness and installs of its others, through in-app banners, interstitials, house ad placements, or featured slots. Because the promoter and the audience belong to the same company, there is no media cost paid to an outside platform; the traffic is the publisher's own. It is a user-acquisition tactic, but an internal one. Instead of buying strangers' attention on an ad network, you route your existing users toward your other products. This makes it a staple of app portfolios, especially in gaming, where studios move players across a catalog of titles.

Cross-promotion in apps matters because it is cheap and high-intent. The users you reach already use one of your apps, so they are a known, engaged audience — often more likely to install a related app than a cold user acquired through paid ads. The install cost is essentially the value of the ad space you gave up rather than cash paid out, which makes cross-promotion one of the lowest-cost acquisition channels a portfolio has. It also raises the lifetime value of a user by spreading them across multiple apps, deepening their relationship with the publisher. The catch is that it only works if you have an existing audience and multiple apps worth cross-promoting, and that every cross-promo placement competes with the revenue that space could have earned from paid ads.

Cross-promotion in apps is a form of user acquisition, but it differs from paid user acquisition in a fundamental way. Paid acquisition buys installs from external ad networks, reaching new, cold audiences at a cost per install set by an auction. Cross-promotion uses your own apps' inventory to reach users you already have, at little or no external cost, but limited to the size of your existing audience. So paid acquisition scales to strangers for money; cross-promotion converts your own warm users for the price of your own ad space. The two are complementary. Paid acquisition grows the top of the portfolio funnel with new users, and cross-promotion multiplies the value of those users by moving them across your other apps once they are already in.

Cross-promotion is also distinct from cross-selling, though they rhyme. Cross-selling means selling an additional, often complementary product to an existing customer — adding revenue from the same person. Cross-promotion in apps is about acquiring users for another app, which may or may not involve a purchase; the immediate goal is the install and the engagement, not necessarily a sale. And unlike a partnership or referral arrangement with another company, cross-promotion here is internal — you own both the app doing the promoting and the app being promoted, so there is no revenue share or partner to manage. Keeping these straight matters. Cross-promotion moves your users between your apps for installs, cross-selling sells more to a customer, and partner promotion trades audiences with someone else.

Using cross-promotion in apps well means matching the right app to the right audience and respecting the user experience. Promote apps that genuinely fit the users you are showing them to — a puzzle game's players are a good audience for another puzzle game, less so for an unrelated utility — because relevance drives installs and irrelevance just annoys. Place the promotions where they do not wreck the experience of the host app, since aggressive cross-promo that interrupts or frustrates users can cost you engagement and retention in the very app doing the promoting. Weigh each placement against its opportunity cost, because the space used for cross-promotion could have shown a paid ad. And measure it, tracking installs, downstream engagement, and portfolio lifetime value, not just clicks.

The failures are cross-promoting irrelevant apps, which convert poorly and irritate users; overloading the host app with promotions until they damage its own retention; ignoring the opportunity cost of the ad space given up; and measuring cross-promotion on installs alone without checking whether those users actually stick and add value. The discipline is to cross-promote relevant apps to well-matched audiences, place the promotions with restraint so the host app stays healthy, weigh each placement against the paid-ad revenue it displaces, and judge success by portfolio-wide engagement and lifetime value. Done this way, cross-promotion in apps turns an existing audience into a cheap, high-intent engine for growing the whole portfolio rather than a nuisance that erodes the app it runs in.

Cross-promotion in apps — cross, meaning across, plus promotion — names advertising one app across the users of another in the same portfolio to acquire installs.

Etymology: source.

Search interest for this term over the last five years:

View interest-over-time on Google Trends →

Areas of marketing where cross-promotion in apps is a core concern: