Here’s a couple posts with hard numbers to link App Store ranks with actual numbers for you!
First up, conversions for the … well, let’s be polite, the novelty application iFart Mobile can be found here:
Date – Units/Day – Rankings
12/12 – 75 units – #70 entertainment
12/13 – 296 units – #16 entertainment
12/14 – 841 units – #76 overall, #8 entertainment
12/15 – 1510 units – #39 overall, #5 entertainment
12/16 – 1797 units – #22 overall, #3 entertainment
12/17 – 2836 units – #15 overall, #3 entertainment
Hey, even at only 99¢ apiece, that looks like a good return on investment, doesn’t it now?
For a more detailed look at budgets, sales and revenue, you can look here and find a dissection of the performance of the more intrinsically useful AppCubby applications. Selected highlights:
While I agree with the need for marketing, the only methods of marketing I’ve found to be measurably cost effective are working with the press and getting featured by Apple, both of which are essentially free, but incredibly hard to guarantee…
I’ll start with the earliest marketing attempt, a banner ad on Macworld.com … Without click tracking there is no way to know exactly how many clicks turned into sales, but I doubt it was anywhere near the number needed to break even, much less turn a profit on this endeavor.
The AdMob experiment … I spent over $500 (2224 clicks) the first day and couldn’t wait to check my sales the next morning. Well, sales barely moved, and I had spent 3 times more on advertising than I saw in gross sales … After spending the last $3,000 buying ads for Gas Cubby, I still haven’t seen a pattern that would confirm AdMob to be a cost effective marketing solution for my apps. This is by no means a conclusive test of the overall effectiveness of AdMob, but the numbers are pretty telling.
I’m admittedly not an AdWords ninja, so I took a very conservative approach, bidding low on highly targeted ads. The ads have throttled up and down as cheap ad space comes and goes, but have added up to almost $600 in 4 months. Without a way to track which clicks turn into sales, it seems foolish to throw money into a black hole bound by competitive placement and fraught with click fraud.
Many developer’s have chosen to offer an “Lite” version of their app … As opposed to what most people think, this strategy doesn’t seem to be paying off for most developers.
Hmmmm. Well, if none of the conventional advertising channels work, what does? Well, it kinda boils down to making yourself worthy of attention, oddly enough:
… so far the strategy that has made the most fiscal sense is to spend money on development and hope for good placement with Apple and the press.
There you go then — your one sentence guide to how to succeed at iPhone development!
DEC