the appfarm

The day after we launched iCombat lite (iTunes link) I wrote a post about how we had waited months longer than we should have to launch a lite version.  Looking back the delay was caused mostly by a fear of cannibalizing our potential user base and concern for giving away our iCombat’s secret sauce in the demo version. After a month live in the app store, the evidence for doing a lite version is compelling proof for anyone looking to launch an app on a small marketing budget. See below the 1 month conversion stats as well as some of our key takeaways:

Conversion rates well above 5%

Most developers report conversion rates between 0.5% and 2%, and while Ethan Nicholas of iShoot fame at one point claimed (see comments) a conversion rates of 8% (200k sales off of 2.4MM lite downloads at the time) we didn’t think that was a reasonable expectation given the increased competition in the App store since (and in the gaming category more specifically).  And since there is no way of knowing where users are coming from we thought at minimum we should break out the conversion rates controlling for the previous month’s sales average.

I was surprised when I found our conversion rates in the control case close to 7% percent for U.S. sales.  Even when iCombat was clearing over 2.5k lite downloads a day our conversion rate was peaking at above 9%. While the early high conversion rate could be attributable in part to iCombat’s update that also occurred during the period, the averages trended steadily around this rate both before and after the update went live.  Aside from the new release it is worth noting that most other conditions were controlled for as there was no press, no features by Apple, no reviews, advertisements or anything else that might have spiked sales (a real marketing coup we know).

As for the big surge in monthly sales (5x), this is a bit skewed due to the low average volume of sales iCombat had experienced in the month prior to the launch of the lite version.

Some lessons learned:

1. Should have released lite version from the beginning – There was no point to waiting and sacrificing the initial new release buzz.  Since it is harder to get featured once your app is launched, say for app updates, it is important to strike early and hard with your app release.

2. Lite does NOT cannibalize sales – If your app is a gimmick then it might not make sense but in all other cases it only helps to increase sales (see our previous post on this topic)

3. Get the bugs out for your lite release – users churn lite apps and are fine giving you 1 star if they don’t like the experience.  This is especially bad because the App store prompts users to rate an app when they try to delete it

4. Lite sales trail off too but paid sales remain higher – if you don’t have the x-factor that is needed to spread the word your lite downloads will fall as they have for iCombat, but in our case paid sales have continued to sell at a minimum rate several times higher than the pre-lite period

5. Frequent releases do juice downloads – Pocket God and other frequently updated apps have benefited from a weekly sales bump as they show up in the new releases section of the app store (users also like this episode style model)

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Tags: AppStore, conversion rates, iCombat, lite
Posted in Strategy, blog, marketing | 9 Comments »

The post below is an excerpt of a larger post I wrote during the launch of iCombat (iTunes link). The post is worth reading if you are an indie developer thinking about launching an iPhone application on your own:

I came across an interesting post on “How to use Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to market your mobile games” and it reinforced what I have noticed since readying to launch iCombat – there are too many channels to manage when it comes to reaching the end user! This may sound like a high class problem to all of the game and content developers that have faced the gatekeepers of distribution over the years but the sudden blossoming of dozens of channels to reach users has created its own set of problems. Now the burden of brand management and marketing has fallen into the lap of the indie developers, where they must become “marketers” of their product if they hope to get noticed.

The rise of the fractured, multichannel market has created dozens of sites that developers now need to visit to build goodwill and help gain exposure, something that is fundamentally different from what they probably want to be doing. In our case this translates into 18-20 hours of work a day since launch to manage the marketing effort. While we have a dedicated team for this, most developers don’t have the luxury of even dedicating all of their own time to managing their launch.

I have compiled a list of some of the tools and sites I think necessary to run a solid app marketing effort:

Top Down channels – kissing the ring

1. Bloggers – aka the “digital influencers” – sites with major traffic like Gizmodo, Techcrunch, GigaOM
2. Targeted review sites – Touch Arcade, 148Apps, Pocket Gamer, etc. – we have counted 60+ serious ones in all

Bottom Up channels – connecting with your users

1. Facebook – both personal status and group page
2. Twitter
3. MySpace
4. App/ Development/ Gaming Forums - Touch Arcade, maybe iPhonedevSDK, etc.
5. Product website & blog – here you need to have a demo, maybe a news section and your blog
6. YouTube – a great way to communicate with avid gamers
7. iTunes App store summary

Analytics Tools – monitoring usage, downloads, buzz

1. User downloads – iTunes Connect – Heartbeat App or AppViz (super easy to use but less flexible than Heartbeat)
2. Usage behavior – Pinch Media – gives you uniques, geo data, version & device stats, as well as unique data by action in your App (very cool)
3. App ranking – AppRanking by Michael Dorn or Mobclix
4. Web traffic - Google Analytics or Wordpress Stats
5. Affiliate data – Linkshare – here if you are an Apple affiliate you can earn back 5% of your 30% cut that goes to Apple – and monitor clickthrough conversion data from your site
6. Brand management – ScoutLabs or Google Alerts – Scout doesn’t really seem to work for small apps or early on in a campaign as it is, for these smaller apps Google Alerts is a great basic filter

While this list is not comprehensive this is basically everything we are using for the marketing of iCombat. I didn’t realize just how many channels and tools this involved until trying to post an urgent piece of news. When iCombat was reviewed in Gizmodo’s weekly roundup of iPhone apps we quickly wanted to update every channel we were using. (more…)

Tags: AppStore, indie developers, marketing, noise
Posted in Tips, blog, games, marketing | 1 Comment »