App Sales, What’s Hot – What’s Not – #3: “Free for one Day” Promotions

This post continues my analysis of some App Store conditions.

The first post can be found here: App Sales, What’s Hot – What’s Not – #1: Category Featured


#3 – “Free for one Day” Promotions

There is so little you can do to market your App in the App Store / in iTunes itself. Outside the App Store you have some more options but less users.

There are Blogs, News and Promotion-Sites you can ask to blog/write/promote your App. I haven’t done the first two, but the last one I tried with FreeAppADay.com which I stumbled on by researching sales numbers by ranking positions.

I had two of these “Free for one Day” events, one by accident without being promoted and one with an active promotion. This helps identify the influence of such a promotion site and what you can do all by yourself.


Sales before

The baseline to compare everything too are the sales numbers before anything happened:

These are the normal up & downs for a timeframe of 4 weeks.


Set yourself Free

There was a promotion scheduled May 31st, which the App was set to free but freeappaday did not really promote the App. Neither Newsletter, Twitter nor Frontpage News had anything mentioned about the App, but it was free on that day! Here is what happened, the same graph +4 days:

6.600 more Downloads:

  • 1.000 on the evening of the first day (~6 hours)
  • 5.000 on the promotion day
  • 600 on the morning of the following day (~6 hours)

The App moved in the Free-App-Charts to the top of its category within that day.


Sales the following day

Having the App on 6.600 extra iPhones and iPads should help its sales. Average sales increased by +10% after these days.

No need for a graph here, you can imagine +10% :-)


Free for one Day, with Promotion

The App was prepared exactly the same way about 6 weeks later and was sent to:

  • 13.000+ Twitter Followers
  • 20.000+ Newsletter Subscribers
  • Put on the Front Page of freeappaday.com
  • …and was announced to be the first Opening App for the new iPad Category

The results were nearly the same:

  • 700 Downloads on the evening of the first day (~10 hours)
  • 4.000 Downloads on the promotion day
  • 600 Downloads on the morning of the following day (~10 hours)

= 5.300 Downloads, thats about 1.300 less compared to the free day 6 weeks earlier.

The App moved again in the Free-App-Charts to the top of its category within that day.


Why was the promotion less successful?

I have a Google Alert on the App’s name which made me aware of some websites that monitor price changes of Apps. These seem to have a very large user base that can be accessed very easily, if your App costs several dollars and drops down to zero.

My guess is, that the first try in May got all these users that were looking on these monitoring websites. The second try got all the users of freeappday.com and the ones looking on these “monitoring sites”. Someone can only guess how the users are divided between the two sources, my guess is 50/50.


Sales the following day

Having the App on 5.300 (this makes a total of 11.900) extra iPhones and iPads should help its sales again. Average sales increased again by +10% after these days.

But: There was a big difference on the second day, the App went back to $3.99. In contrast to the first try, there were more people actually buying the App on that day, the revenue increased +70%. This could mean that there are more people willing to buy an App on freeappaday.com than on the “monitoring sites”.



One month later

The sales decreased slowly in the following weeks and stabilized on nearly the same niveau before both Free-Days. The effect wasn’t permanent but this is basically because the App was not one you will show your friends or talk about it very often. If an App is more viral that could be a jump-start to get it on track :-)


Conclusion

What I didn’t say, is that freeappaday.com wants $1.200 for their promotion ($600 for “new” developers) and requires you to promote their website in your App description on the day your App is free.

So the conclusion I come to, is that you might not need such promotion portals. You can get the same number if users very easily for free if you just set your pricing to free and wait for these “monitoring sites” to catch it on the iTunes RSS feeds. Depending on your pricing on the previous days, you should get the same results as being on such a “free for one day” promotion portal.

Published on 2010/08/10 12:48.
Filed under: Unsorted Tags: , , , ,

July 4th in the App Store

Independence Day as nationwide US holiday should affect your sales in the US. Why not take a look at the numbers and see what exactly happens?

Here is how it affected my sales, first graph is US only and the second is all stores including US. Both are for the past two weeks.

As you can see, the 4th was a overall normal day, in the US a bit lower, but on the 5th I felt it by -35% on that day :-)

I made similar observations on some soccer nations the last days, while the soccer world championships.

Very involved nations had low sales while playing (and a day after that). I wonder if someone had the time and access to numbers to analyse this further?

Published on 2010/07/07 20:01.
Filed under: Unsorted Tags: , ,

App Sales, What’s Hot – What’s Not – #2: New & Noteworthy in an iTunes Category

This post continues my analysis of some App Store conditions.

The first post can be found here: App Sales, What’s Hot – What’s Not – #1: Category Featured


#2 – New & Noteworthy in iTunes

When you release a new App you get a chance of getting listed in the New & Noteworthy section on the iTunes within your category.

These aren’t hand picked and so it is very easy to get in there if your first day downloads are high enough. I had two App releases where I could watch what happens if you get into that list.


Looking New & Noteworthy

Here are two screenshots, showing both Apps on top of their categories in iTunes in two different countries:

The Apps are Analytics for iPad (iPad only) and Webshot (Universal).

The duration of the listing is very short and depends very much on how many new releases are published into that category. From what I have seen, you get listed for about 1-2 days.


How to analyse this position

I will compare them with two other releases which were iPad only and Universal – both never listed in this prominent spot.

Because these are new releases, there are no previous sale statistics that could increase. Therefor I will compare the first four weeks of sales after release.
The sales will be compared with sales made in the same country they were listed New & Noteworthy.


Sales numbers – iPad App only

First the one that was New & Noteworthy:

The graph is not exactly four weeks because the App is not that old yet, but the trend is visible.

You can see a spike on the first day and sales going down very fast to a constant level.


And one that wasn’t New & Noteworthy:

No spike in the beginning but a slowly growing number of sales over time.


Sales numbers – Universal App


Again, first the New & Noteworthy one:

Again: You can see a spike on the first day and sales going down very fast. Later they start growing again, very slowly.


And the one which was not:

No spike in the beginning. No growth visible in that country.

On a side note: Most sales for Universal Apps seem to be iPhone based, iPad users still seem to have problems finding Apps.
Originally these Universal Apps were meant for the iPad and made iPhone compatible to reach a bigger audience.


Conclusion

These numbers are very tough to read because the event is so short and the numbers are not that high.

But a trend can be found and looks promising. If you get listed in the New & Noteworthy listing on iTunes you seem to get a good and very visible spot to kick off your new App.

In contrast to not being listed, you will find the sales trends going down instead of up in the following weeks because there is a huge spike in the beginning that you can not repeat without other marketing or promotions.

Thats why this seems to be a worthy spot to claim.

But how can you improve your chances?
I will try to use promo codes. Getting all available promo codes into user hands and get them to purchase my App within the first hours after its release may be worth a try.

Published on 2010/07/03 13:10.
Filed under: Unsorted Tags: , , , , , , , ,

App Sales, What’s Hot – What’s Not – #1: Category Featured

If you are selling on the App Store you might start wondering on how you will sell your Apps.

Well, some people won’t think but just put their App in the store and wait what happens (I am such a guy ;-)

But afterwards I made some observations I would like to share, especially because there are so few developers that share their experience with the Store.

I will split my observations into different posts to make it 1) easier to read and 2) to allow myself to pause between posts :-)

I will write about the following conditions and events:

  1. Category Featured
  2. New and Noteworthy listing in iTunes Category
  3. “Free for one Day” Promotions
  4. in the Spotlight / in the “What’s hot section” on the iPads App Store
  5. What’s new listing on the iPad and iTunes
  6. Keyword optimization
  7. TV Popularity of an unrelated show
  8. Visual Quality (yes, you heard me!)
  9. Ranking Positions (Top 10 – Top 100)

Not necessary in that exact order. I might sort the list after everything is written and published.

These conditions and events have been made with three different Apps totally unrelated to each other.

So. Let’s begin.


#1 – Category Featured

jQuery Reference is a nice small App to lookup all import jQuery related stuff without opening a browser or searching google. Basically it is a searchable list of the jQuery function listing and its documentation.

The App has been released on Apr 14th shortly after the iPad has been launched and Apple was still playing with the App Store functionality.

In the beginning it climbed into the Top 25 of its category, which wasn’t too hard because there were not many iPad Apps. After a few days it slowly lost its ranking and finally went into something below 100. It came back between 9am – 8pm PST into the rankings when people were buying it.

All numbers for sales and rankings are for the US Store only!
Excluding the rest of the world keeps the stats clean from unknown factors or random customers in some distant countries.


Ranking

On May 5th I noticed a spike in the ranking in its category “Reference”. The App was in the “Featured” Apps on top of its category.

Within hours it jumped back into the top 50 at, this time because of it was “Featured”:


The ranking got a bit more solid for the following two weeks until it was removed from the featured listing.

Screenshots: Category Featured

This is how the featured looked like on the iPad. When someone opened the category “Reference” he got a list of featured Apps on top.
The App was three screens next to the center on the category “Reference” on the iPads version of the App Store:

 

Sales Numbers

If rankings are affected, sales must be too, because only sales can push you up in the rankings.

Well, here are the true sales numbers:

 

Keep in mind that the sales statistics are compiled only once a day on the end of the day. The sales numbers are in units.

The average of 4 sales per day increased to 6 per day which is a 50% increase. The percentage should not be applied to other Apps, the sales numbers are too low to read too much into them.

 

Interesting is also what happens after the featured status was gone. Here are the sales numbers for four weeks after that:

The sales average dropped back to an average of 4 per day and the ranking went down to below the top 100.

While this looks and sounds like nothing was really going on, looking at the big picture of the revenues of that timeframe everything becomes clearer:

The sales were constant in the featured time compared to very random sales before and after. The week following the feature the sales were still a bit higher, which might be caused by the higher rankings. After that sales dropped very fast to zero.

I plan to submit an update with some minor enhancements to see how much influence it has.

 

Conclusion

Conclusion? It’s nice to have such a small category feature and it makes a difference but it won’t make you rich.

There were only 3 million sold iPads after the analyzed time (wasn’t it 3 million after 80 days? correct me if I’m wrong!), making possible customers still very rare.
But when I first seen the feature I was thinking about hundreds of possible customers buying my App – well, the next day told me otherwise: two more customers ;-)

It seems that Apple has dropped the Category-Features in many categories, maybe because it was too much work and too less revenue ;-)
The game section appears to be the only one left which such a Featured-Listing.

 

Oh, and if you are curious about the App, you can find it here: jQuery Reference :-)

Published on 2010/06/29 14:24.
Filed under: Unsorted Tags: , ,

product sections added

I have just started to move the product descriptions of all iPad Apps to this site.

That is:

(click on the link to learn more ;)

All posts are dated back to their original release date.

Published on 2010/06/27 21:14.
Filed under: Unsorted Tags: ,

Apple’s bitten by a bug?

If you are an Apple Developer, you will learn to be patient. You will learn that support mails will need days or weeks before they get answered, sometimes pointing to another support address which previously pointed you to that very address you wrote an email to.

If you are developing for the iPhone/iPod/iPad you will wait an average of two weeks before your App gets posted to the App Store.

Patience is something you really need with Apple, especially with the iPhone Developer Program.

Normally you can live with this, because everything is running smooth and you just need to be patient… but what happens when patience won’t help because something really went wrong and noone is doing anything?

Here’s the story:


The Update

It begins with the patience thing again. After waiting for about two weeks to get an update for an App of mine reviewed and accepted by Apple I went to iTunes Connect and updated the description to match the new features.
I was happy that this update was ready for sale just hours before a scheduled promotion on a website.


Removed from Sale

After I was done with the description a very strange thing happened:
That very App vanished from my administration and shortly after that all my other Apps vanished too accompanied by an email from Apple telling me that they have been “Removed from sale” which is a status Apple documents like this: “Removed from Sale (Red) – appears when the binary has been removed from the App Store.”

The FAQ suggests filling out a contact form with the App’s Id to get information from Apple.



Published on 2010/06/21 01:23.
Filed under: Unsorted Tags: , ,

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