Winning the App Store – Part 1
What does it take to make it to the top of the App Store? In this two part post we’ll experiment to see what we can do on a shoestring budget. We wanted to give the developer community and those curious about the world of apps a look under the hood at the numbers of a specific marketing campaign. (Your results may vary)
Part 1 is dedicated to covering the app’s journey through the App Store so far and Part II will release the data pertaining to a recent campaign to help launch an app of ours into the top of iPhone and iPad charts.
Alarm Clock Radio (Free and Paid) has been downloaded over 1.5 million times since launch. The app has been a rollercoaster of ups and downs and has made about $77,000 in revenue to date. Not bad, but not Angry Bird like. The app has been updated a half dozen times, released, bugfixed and enhanced several times. With each release we fix bugs, address customer issues and generally try to make the app better.
The initial app was released as a paid application. This did well internationally but never broke into the US market. Looking below, you’ll notice a spike and fall that came upon the back of internationalization. Other spikes were the result of press, version updates, experimentation with price and unaccounted for market forces. Our most recent experiment was adding support for the iPad.
The app has not (yet) had the honor of being featured by Apple, however it’s been able to keep a strong following, especially in Japan where the app has been consistently highly ranked.
The experiment we ran was a pure marketing play associated with a popular website called “FreeAppADay.com.”
At the time of this post we’re currently at stage #5 of six. The initial promotion resulted in over 100,000 free downloads on August 31 and the app will switched back to paid after a brief time as free. We pulled our lite version to funnel downloads to the current promotion.
In terms of “cost per aquisition” or the marketing cost it takes to get one users to try your product. After just one day the app is currently ranked in the top 10 iPhone free apps and the top 5 iPad Free apps. We measured a little over 109,000 free downloads on August 31.
We expect the cost per acquisition to be under a penny. Obviously this is still not a way to profitability if you’re giving away your product. The goal of course is to convert this momentum into sales.
In the second part of this post we will release the promotional statistics as well as sales numbers for a glimpse at what the sling-shot looks like and if we’ll see if we can take the app to the top of the paid charts.