Hi there,
Thanks for reaching out! Happy to give you some initial thoughts on this. You're asking about the typical pricing for a Google Ads app install campaign in Austin, TX. It's a sensible question, but tbh, it's also the wrong one to be asking. Thinking about a "typical price" is probably the fastest way to set the wrong budget and get frustrated with your results.
The truth is, there's no such thing as a fixed "price" for an app install in Austin, or anywhere else for that matter. It's a live auction, and the cost is decided by a whole bunch of factors that change by the minute. Instead of chasing a mythical average cost, the real goal is to figure out the maximum price *you* can afford to pay for a new user while still making a healthy profit. That number is unique to your business, and it's the only one that truly matters.
Below, I've outlined the framework we use to answer this question properly. It's less about finding an average price and more about building a profitable, scalable user acquisition machine. We'll look at how to calculate what you can afford to spend, what kind of costs you might realistically see, and how to structure your campaigns to actually acheive your goals.
TLDR;
- Stop looking for a "typical" Cost Per Install (CPI). It doesn't exist and focusing on it leads to poor budgetting decisions. The price is set in a dynamic auction.
- The most important metric you need to understand is your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). This tells you exactly how much you can afford to spend to acquire a new user and remain profitable.
- Your actual CPI will depend heavily on your app's category (e.g., gaming vs. finance), the quality of your ad creative, and the level of competition in your market. It could be anything from under £2 to over £20.
- For Google App Campaigns, your primary levers for optimisation are your creative assets (videos, images, text) and your audience signals. You need a robust testing plan from day one.
- This guide includes an interactive LTV calculator to help you find your maximum allowable CPI and a flowchart visualising a succesful optimisation process.
We need to talk about why 'Typical Pricing' is a trap...
Before we get into the numbers, it's really important to understand why asking "what's the price in Austin?" is a bit like asking "how much does a house cost in Austin?". Well, it depends. Is it a one-bedroom flat on the outskirts or a mansion downtown? Who else is bidding on it? How motivated is the seller?
Google Ads works in a very similar way. It's a massive, real-time auction. You're not just buying an install; you're bidding against every other app that wants to show an ad to that same user at that same moment. This includes massive companies with eye-watering budgets like Uber, Tinder, and major mobile gaming studios. They're all competing for the same screen space.
The price you pay, your Cost Per Install (CPI), is determined by a few key things:
1. Competition: Who else is targeting users in Austin? If you're in a highly competetive space like food delivery or fintech, you can bet that your rivals are bidding aggressively. This drives the price up for everyone. Austin is a major tech hub, so expect competition to be fierce for almost any app category.
2. App Category & Monetisation: How you make money has a huge impact. A hyper-casual game that makes fractions of a penny per user from ads can't afford to pay much for an install. On the other hand, a B2B SaaS app with a £50/month subscription or a finance app that profits from high-value transactions can afford a much, much higher CPI. The algorithm knows this and the bids will reflect it.
3. Ad Quality & Relevance: Google wants to show users ads they'll actually engage with. If your ads (your videos, images, and text) are high quality and get a good click-through rate, Google will reward you with a better "Ad Rank". This means you can often win the auction even if your bid is lower than a competitor's. This is your main advantage against the big players – better creative can beat a bigger budget.
4. Targeting & Audience: Who are you trying to reach? A broad audience of 18-65 year olds will be cheaper to reach than a very specific niche, like C-level executives interested in accounting software. The more valuable the audience, the more people are bidding to reach them, and the higher the cost.
So, you can see that a "typical price" is a meaningless idea. Your neighbour could be paying $0.80 for a game install while you're being quoted $15 for a business productivity app install, and you could both be running profitable campaigns. The focus has to shift from the cost itself to the *value* that user brings to your business over their lifetime.
The only number that actually matters: Your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
This brings us to the most critical piece of the puzzle, and something most new advertisers completely overlook. The real question isn't "How low can my CPI go?" but rather "How high a CPI can I afford to acquire a truly great user?" The answer is found in your Customer Lifetime Value, or LTV.
LTV represents the total profit you can expect to make from a single user over the entire time they use your app. Once you know this number, everything else falls into place. It becomes your north star for ad spending. If you know a user is worth £100 to you in profit, you know you can confidently spend up to £30-£40 to acquire them and still have a very healthy business model.
Calculating it can seem a bit daunting, but the basic formula is quite straightforward. You need three pieces of information:
- Average Revenue Per User (ARPU): How much money, on average, does one user generate per month? This could be from subscriptions, in-app purchases, or ad revenue.
- Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue? You need to subtract any direct costs associated with that revenue (e.g., app store fees, cost of goods sold for physical products, server costs directly tied to user activity).
- Monthly Churn Rate %: What percentage of your users do you lose each month? (i.e., they uninstall the app or cancel their subscription).
The calculation is then:
LTV = (ARPU * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate
Trying to work this out on paper can be a pain, so I've built a simple interactive calculator for you below. Play around with the sliders to see how small changes in churn or revenue can have a massive impact on your LTV, and consequently, how much you can afford to spend on ads.
As you can see, once you know your LTV, the conversation changes. If your LTV is £140, a CPI of £10 suddenly looks incredibly cheap. A CPI of £40 is still very profitable. This empowers you to bid confidently and scale your campaigns, while your competitors who are just trying to get the 'cheapest' installs are probably acquiring low-quality users who churn quickly and never monetise.
So, what *could* your CPI look like? Some realistic ranges
Okay, so now that we've established that LTV is king, I can give you some very broad, experience-based ballpark figures. Please take these with a huge pinch of salt, as your actual results will definately vary based on the factors we discussed earlier. These are based on campaigns we've run for clients across various platforms, including Google, Meta, and Apple Ads.
I remember one campaign we worked on for an app client where we managed to get over 45,000 signups at a cost under £2 each. But that was for a specific type of app in the events and sports space, with a very wide appeal. For a more niche B2B software client, we were very happy to achieve a cost per trial of around $7, because we knew the LTV of a paying customer was in the thousands. It's all relative.
To give you a clearer picture, here’s how CPI can vary drastically by app category in a developed market like the US:
As you can see, the range is enormous. A gaming app might be profitable at $1.00 per install, while a B2B SaaS app might be losing money at $10.00 per install if their LTV isn't high enough. This is why anchoring yourself to a "typical" price is so dangerous. Your budget should be based on your LTV and your business goals, not on what other people might be paying.
Your Go-To-Market strategy for Google App Campaigns
Right, so let's get practical. Google's App Campaigns are a bit of a "black box". You don't pick keywords or placements in the same way you do with traditional Search or Display ads. Instead, you provide Google with a set of "assets" – text, images, and videos – and its machine learning algorithm figures out the best way to combine them and show them across all of Google's properties (Search, YouTube, Google Play, Discover, etc.) to get you the most installs (or in-app actions) for your budget.
This means your job isn't about micromanaging bids and keywords. Your job is to feed the machine with the highest quality inputs possible. Here's what you need to focus on:
1. Start with a "Maximise Installs" Bid Strategy: When you're just starting and have no data, this is the best option. You'll set a target Cost Per Install (tCPI) based on your LTV calculations. For example, if your max allowable CPI is £46, you might start with a tCPI of £10-£15 to give the algorithm some room to learn and find users efficiently. Once you have a steady stream of installs and in-app event data (like sign-ups, purchases, or level completions), you can switch to a "Maximise In-App Actions" strategy, which is much more powerful as it optimises for users who will actually do valuable things in your app.
2. Creative is Your Most Powerful Lever: Since you can't control much of the targeting directly, your creative assets are where you win or lose. You need to test, test, and test again. From our experience, several SaaS clients have seen fantastic results with User-Generated Content (UGC) style videos, as they feel more authentic and less like a slick corporate ad. For your campaign, you'll need to provide a mix of assets:
- Text Ideas: At least 4-5 headlines and descriptions. Focus on the core problem you solve or the main benefit you offer. Don't just list features. Think Before-After-Bridge. "Before: Drowning in spreadsheets. After: Clear financial insights in seconds. Our app is the bridge."
- Images: High-quality screenshots of your app's best features, and lifestyle images that show the *feeling* or *outcome* of using your app. Don't just show the UI, show a happy, relieved user.
- Videos: This is huge. Video is essential, especially for placements on YouTube. You should have multiple variations. A 15-30 second, vertical video (9:16 aspect ratio) for Shorts and mobile placements is a must. A 16:9 landscape version for standard YouTube is also critical. Test different hooks in the first 3 seconds. Show the app in action. Use clear, bold captions as many people watch with the sound off.
3. Guide the Algorithm with Audience Signals: While you don't choose your targeting, you can give Google strong hints about who to go after. In your Asset Group settings, you can add "Audience Signals". This is where you can tell Google: "Hey, start by looking for people like this". You can add custom segments based on people who have searched for your competitors' brand names, or people who have visited certain types of websites. You can also add interests relevant to your app. The algorithm will use this as a starting point before expanding out to find similar users.
How we'd structure your initial tests to find what works
You can't just throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. You need a structured approach to testing so you can learn quickly and efficiently. A chaotic account structure is a recipe for wasted spend. Here’s a simple but effective way to structure your initial campaigns.
The goal is to isolate variables. We'll start by creating seperate Asset Groups within a single campaign, each focused on a different core marketing angle or user persona. This way, you can clearly see which message resonates best with the audience Google finds for you.
Here's a sample structure you could use:
| Level | Name / Theme | Details |
|---|---|---|
| Campaign | [USA - Austin - iOS - App Installs] | Objective: App Installs Bid Strategy: Target CPI (tCPI) Location: Austin, TX Platforms: iOS |
| Asset Group 1 | Theme: Solve a Problem | Headlines: "Stop Wasting Time on [Problem]", "Finally, An Easy Way to [Achieve Goal]" |
| Assets: Videos/Images showing the user's "pain point" and how the app solves it. | ||
| Asset Group 2 | Theme: Highlight Key Feature | Headlines: "The Only App with [Unique Feature]", "Unlock [Benefit] with Our [Feature]" |
| Assets: Videos/Images that are essentially a mini-demo of your killer feature. | ||
| Asset Group 3 | Theme: Social Proof / UGC | Headlines: "See Why Users Call Us 'Life-Changing'", "Join 10,000+ Happy Users" |
| Assets: UGC-style videos, screenshots of 5-star reviews, testimonials. |
By seperating your messaging like this, after a week or two of running the ads, you'll be able to look at the performance of each Asset Group. You might find that the "Solve a Problem" angle gets you installs at a £5 CPI, while the "Key Feature" angle is costing you £15 per install. This is powerful data. It tells you what your audience actually cares about.
This then becomes a continuous cycle of optimisation. The process looks something like this:
The Bottom Line: Your Recommended Action Plan
I know this is a lot of information to take in. It's a far more complex answer than just giving you a "typical price", but this is the only way to approach paid user acquisition for long-term success. If you just set a budget based on an arbitrary number you found online, you're setting yourself up for failure.
To make it all a bit more concrete, here's a summary of the steps I would recommend you take. I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:
| Step | Action | Why This Is Important |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Define Your Economics | Use the LTV calculator (or your own data) to determine your LTV and maximum allowable CPI. Don't spend a single pound on ads until this is done. | This sets your profitability guardrails and turns ad spend from a cost into a calculated investment. It's the foundation of your entire strategy. |
| 2. Set an Initial Test Budget | Allocate a budget that allows you to get at least 50-100 installs *per Asset Group* to give Google enough data to optimise. E.g., if your target CPI is £10, you'll need £500-£1000 per group. | Under-spending is a common mistake. The algorithm needs a significant amount of data to exit its "learning phase" and start performing efficiently. |
| 3. Create Diverse Creative Assets | Develop at least 3 distinct creative themes (e.g., Problem/Solution, Feature-led, Social Proof). For each theme, create a full set of assets: multiple headlines, descriptions, images, and at least one vertical and one landscape video. | Creative is your primary optimisation lever in Google App Campaigns. Diverse assets prevent ad fatigue and allow the algorithm to find the best-performing combinations for different users and placements. |
| 4. Build Your Campaign Structure | Create one campaign targeting Austin, iOS (or Android). Within that campaign, create a seperate Asset Group for each of your creative themes. Add relevant audience signals to each. | This structure allows you to cleanly test your messaging and identify which angle resonates most with your target market without variables getting mixed up. |
| 5. Launch & Be Patient | Launch the campaign and resist the urge to make changes for at least 7-10 days. Let the campaign exit the learning phase. | Constant tinkering resets the learning algorithm and prevents it from ever reaching peak performance. You need to let it gather enough data to make intelligent decisions. |
| 6. Analyse & Iterate | After the initial learning period, analyse the performance of each Asset Group. Pause the clear losers (high CPI, low-quality users). Take the winning theme and create new, refined versions of it for your next test. | This is the core optimisation loop. Continuous, data-driven iteration is how you scale your campaigns profitably and consistently lower your effective CPI over time. |
Navigating all of this can be tricky, especially when you're also trying to run a business. The difference between a campaign that burns through cash and one that drives profitable growth often comes down to experience—knowing which metrics to trust, how to interpret the data, and what creative angles are likely to work for a specific audience.
This is where expert help can make a significant difference. We specialise in this stuff day in, and day out. If you'd like to have a more detailed chat, we offer a completely free, no-obligation initial consultation where we can look at your specific app and goals and give you some more tailored advice.
Hope this helps!
Regards,
Team @ Lukas Holschuh
