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: , , , ,

How to create an .ipa for your App

Apple delivers Apps via iTunes using .ipa files. If you want to deliver some Apps to your testers, you can either sync your App to their device or send them an .ipa too.

An .ipa is nothing more than a simple ZIP archive you can create yourself in three easy steps.


Step 1

  • Create a folder called “Payload“
  • and put your App into it


Step 2

  • Copy your big PNG or JPEG Icon (the 512×512 pixels one) into the same folder where Payload folder resides in and
  • rename the icon to “iTunesArtwork” (yes, no extension)

This step is optional. If you don’t care about an icon in iTunes, ignore it.


Step 3

Compress both, the Payload folder and the iTunesArtwork file into one ZIP archive


Rename the .zip extension into .ipa and voila, you got your ipa for distribution to your testers!

Your testers can double-click the .ipa and sync it to their devices via iTunes.


Btw. ipa stands for iPhone/iPod Touch Application



Published on 2010/07/08 19:18.
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: , , , , , , , ,

Switch to our mobile site