In Part 1 of this series I promised I'd write an update on some of our marketing experiences with the Idiot Detector. It's been on sale for a little over a month, so here goes...
We got off to a half decent start. We missed out being on the "What's New" front page in the Entertainment section on the App Store and were buried deep on page 13!! That certainly didn't help our initial sales. We were probably rescued a little by appearing on the various sites that follow App Store releases. These are not reviews, just the product info pulled off the App Store and presented for readers of those sites. For example...
Over the next couple of weeks the sales dropped off as seems the typical pattern for many iPhone apps.
We then took out an advert on 148apps.com. The ad space we opted for was shared with 8 others, but with 500,000 visits per month we thought we'd get enough traffic. And we had a decent run of sales. This graph shows the trends...
The advert provider behind 148apps.com is buysellads.com. They provide a really cool dashboard where you can collect all sorts of useful stats about your advert. It turns out that just under 1% of people who saw the advert clicked the link through to iTunes. Of these around 25% actually went on to purchase the software. That's really not a bad conversion rate!
So what's next for Dr Ivan Egghead's Amazing Idiot Detector? Well, if 25% of people who see it on iTunes are actually going to buy it - we clearly need to get more people to see it on iTunes! Work is currently underway on a cunning plan and I'll report back form the labs of Dr Ivan Egghead with part 3 of this tale next month...
2 Comments:
How do you think things would have gone if you placed the advert at the time of release rather than waiting a couple of weeks?
Do you think advertising at the start would have got you heaps more sales and potentially featured (due to your advert sales being added to your initial release sales)? or is it smarter to wait for the initial rush to calm down and then advertise to reinvigorate sales?
Given that there will be a peak when you release your app and that an ad will (hopefully) drive more sales, I would say it would be better to do it all up front. If you can get onto the 'most popular' page from your category then that in itself will drive sales.
The downside of this of course is that it is hard to see how successful the advert was. Do the sales come from the advert or are they just because the app is new?
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