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.
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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: , , , ,

Analytics for iPad in Google’s App Gallery

Yesterday Google decided to list Analytics for iPad in its App Gallery, you can find it here:

https://www.google.com/analytics/apps/about?app_id=270001

This might help new Users find Analytics for iPad and also let Users gain more trust in it.

Published on 2010/08/08 09:15.
Filed under: Unsorted Tags: ,

Analytics for iPad, Release 1.4

Yet another update was submitted to Apple a few minutes ago.

It will contain a bunch of new reports and some GUI improvements:


The new features and reports are:

  • An Option to select the detail level of the map overlay (city, country, sub continent, continent)
  • A Quick selection for timeframes added: Today, Yesterday, Last 7 days, Last 28 days, Last week, Current week, Last month, Current month
  • A New Option to select Goals No. 1-5 on all Goal Reports
  • If you dont have an internet connection, the last report is still available on the next startup
  • New Reports for the Premium Version:
    Site Search: Usage, Search Terms, Start Pages, Destination Pages, Categories, Trending
    AdSense: Content, Referrers, Trending
    Event Tracking: Categories, Actions, Labels, Trending, Hostnames
    Visitors: Languages, Browser, Operating Systems, Browsers and OS, Screen Colors, Screen Resolutions, Flash Versions, Java Support, Service Providers, Hostnames, Connection Speeds
    Mobile: Mobile Devices, Mobile Carriers
    AdWords: Day Parts, Destination URLs, Placements

The new version will offer you about 80+ reports! That is without options like single Goal or Revenue reports!


Improved is:

  • The Login procedure will not ask to authorize again, if you saved the password
  • Minor GUI and Data handling improvements (like a better menu and some eye candy)
  • In fullscreen mode the report selection can be accessed by tapping once on the report

Also bugfixes are included:

  • Visitors Bounce Rate Report was showing the wrong data
  • Bug in the login procedure which prevented some logins
  • A Crash when doing manual content filtering on slow internet connections



2010/08/01 – Today the update hit the store, watch out for update notices in iTunes or the App Store to get it on your iPad!

Published on 2010/08/01 19:44.
Filed under: Unsorted Tags:

Force IE8 into compatibility mode

If your website is rendered wrong in IE8, you can force it to render in IE7 compatibility mode.

Use a simple meta tag:


 <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />

Published on 2010/07/13 14:05.
Filed under: Unsorted Tags: ,

Analytics for iPad, Release 1.3

Just a few minutes ago a new update was submitted to Apple.

It will contain three very exciting new features:


1) The often requested row-selection

You are now able to select the number of rows to display. Choose between 10, 25, 50, 100, 250 and 500 rows.
But remember, the more you select, the longer you will need to wait!


2) Sub-Categories for the Traffic Sources

Do you want to see how your campaigns perform? Which goals or what revenue you get from a single source?
These are the reports you have waited for!


3) Page filter for Content reporting

Do you want to analyze just a small portion of your content?
Use the page filter to search for them. Only matching results will be included in the report!


For a better screen overview, the new reportings options will only be visible when available.


The release also includes a small improvement:
The compare switch is now independently saved.

And an important bugfix:
Special characters in website names caused the App to crash.

2010/07/23 – Today the update hit the store, watch out for update notices in iTunes or the App Store to get it on your iPad!

Published on 2010/07/11 17:29.
Filed under: Unsorted Tags:

Detecting iPad Orientation in Safari using JavaScript

I stumbled on that by accident. One of my javascript-variables was called orientation and was not correctly used on the iPad’s Safari.

After looking at its content, I found out that you can detect the device orientation. I knew you can handle many cool things on the iOS, like swipes in javascript, but this one was new to me.

So, what are you going to do with this? It’s obvious: Style your website or re-order your content to match exactly your iPad’s orientation ;-)

You can use javascript in an event handler, loop, or whatever by accessing window.orientation (or only orientation).

Here’s an example on how to detect the current orientation of the iPad device either by pressing a button or when the orientation changes, using an event called onOrientationChange:


You can also use CSS Stylesheets using the media definition:


The detection is not restricted to the iPad, it should work on all iOS devices.

Published on 2010/07/10 18:08.
Filed under: Unsorted Tags: , , , , ,

Time-based Kill-Switch for iOS Apps

If you want to set your App to stop working at a specific date, you are thinking about a time-based Kill-Switch.

You will want to do something like that if you worry about illegal copies of your Apps, you have sent out for testing purpose.

Realizing such switch is very easy, here’s an example:

	NSDate *killDate = [NSDate dateWithTimeIntervalSinceNow:0];
	int killDateTs = [killDate timeIntervalSince1970];
	if ( killDateTs > 1280624461 ) { // 2010-08-01
		exit(0);
	}


Replace the timestamp with your own expire time and your App will stop working at that day.

Published on 2010/07/09 16:21.
Filed under: Unsorted Tags: , ,

Amazon S3 with Bucket Policies

I received a newsletter from amazon some hours ago with some news about S3:

[..]
We are pleased to announce beta support for Amazon S3 bucket policies, which gives customers the ability to create conditional rules for managing access to their buckets and objects. Amazon S3 customers now have the following options for restricting access to their resources:

  • Authenticated requests: Allow or deny access based on AWS account
  • Query string authentication with expiring URLs: Allow temporary access to resources
  • Request-based restrictions: Allow or deny access based on request attributes, such as HTTP referrer and IP address

With bucket policies, customers can also now define security rules that apply to more than one object, including all objects or a subset of objects within a bucket. This makes updating and managing permissions easier.
[..]

This makes S3 much more fun! You can create temporary access to resources based on a query string like session id’s.

You can restrict content to be used only within your website without external linking (HTTP referrer).

And simple group editing using security rules, just change the rules for a folder with one command instead of executing it for every file!

I like that!

More control over your own data and easier editing!


Published on 2010/07/08 19:48.
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: , ,

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