Cross-promotion: the install channel most studios ignore

Every studio with two or more apps is sitting on an ad network it never uses. Your users already open your apps every day — and every one of those sessions is an impression you could be showing your other apps to, for free.

Why cross-promotion converts better than paid UA

A user inside your app has already passed the hardest filter: they found you, installed you, and came back. When they see an ad for another of your apps:

• Trust transfers. The ad carries your quality bar, not a stranger's.
• Targeting is built in. A user of your email cleaner is exactly the audience for your calendar planner.
• The economics are unbeatable. No bid, no auction, no CPI. The only cost is a slice of screen real estate you control.

Typical native cross-promo placements see click-through rates well above what the same creative earns on paid networks — it is the same math that makes App Store featuring so valuable, applied to inventory you own.

What you need to do it properly

Hard-coding "check out our other app" banners breaks the moment you ship a new app or want to pause a promotion. A real setup needs four pieces:

1. A campaign layer — which app is being promoted, at what weight, in which window.
2. Creatives — the native ad content: title, icon, banner, call-to-action.
3. Serving rules — never show an app its own ad, match the platform, respect locales.
4. Measurement — impressions, clicks and CTR per campaign, or you are flying blind.

That is exactly the shape of Cross-Promo: register your apps, create weighted campaigns with native creatives, integrate a small SDK, and read the numbers.

Start with one placement

Do not over-engineer the first version. Pick one high-traffic screen — a settings page footer, a post-action interstitial moment, an empty state — and render one native ad there. Measure for two weeks. In our experience a single well-placed native slot on a 50k-DAU app drives four figures of sibling-app installs per month, at exactly zero spend.