iPhone cross-application promotion analysis

Back when I announced my iPhone app Flux I mentioned it was more of a marketing experiment than anything else. The question back then was: "Can a free app increase sales of a paid app?" The answer in short is "sorta, yes", the real answer is more complicated...

First lets have a look at the best case scenario. You release a free app, and a week later it shows up on the "New" list. This is exactly what happened with Flux (yay!) unfortunately it only happened in Canada (yay?) Being featured in one country alone is odd enough, but it also never appeared in the "New & Noteworthy" section in iTunes - only in the "New" section on the device App Store. The device is where you want to be of course, but this was odd - I don't think anyone knows how Apple chooses what apps to feature and when, but I can safely say now that I got absolutely no clue how this crap works - my theory is someone goofed. Anyway, since the first day of being half-featured it shot into the top 10 free entertainment apps and stayed there, also occasionally popped in and out of the top 25 free apps overall. This works out to around 3,000 downloads a day at its peak, down to around 1,500 day a week later (remember, this is the Canada store only).

My only paid app at the moment is Pinch 'n Pop! so one way to judge how this experiment is working is to look at Pinch 'n Pop!'s ranking in the Canada store:



Unfortunately I don't have ranking data prior to June 6th, but you can still see an obvious (if fragile) upward trend the day after Flux was featured. This is of course the effect I had hoped for, but seeing as this is the Canada store and those are the Kids/Family subcategories, this only translates to an average of around 5 downloads a day. Still, much better than than the 0.2 downloads a day I was averaging in Canada previously.

Here is a more sobering graph:



This shows the estimated world-wide profit (in CAD$) for Pinch 'n Pop! since May 1st. You can easily see how an update can affect sales (and how quickly an app gets buried again), but sales following the release of Flux are pretty flat - similar to the background-noise sales I normally see between updates. It's fair to say those sales would've been even worse if not for the small bump in Canada, but a pittance plus a pittance is still a pittance

I've seen no appreciable trends in other countries. Flux has been downloaded nearly 10,000 times in the USA and was scrapping the bottom of the top 100 free entertainment apps list early on, but once it finally fell off that list downloads dropped to well under 100 a day. Sadly it seems difficult to get any kind of exposure on the USA store these days - even with a free app, and even with similarly-useless apps sitting in the top paid lists.

Some more details and hindsight

Although I generally despise SEO (search-engine-optimization) tactics I did play around with the name displayed in the App Store a bit, changing it from "Flux" to "Flux (Liquid Fire)" and back again a few times. I found that "Flux (Liquid Fire)" definitely got more attention than just "Flux", so I guess a little SEO never hurts. The increased downloads may have more to do with EBO (eye-ball-optimization) than SEO however. For the most part, people buy/download whatever's stuffed in front of their faces, so the more eyes you can draw to your app while it's visible the better.

Flux 1.0 contained a link to the www.chaoticbox.com website and a generic "More from Chaotic Box" link that leads directly to Pinch 'n Pop!'s App Store page. For Flux 1.1 (which was just approved today) I've updated the Pinch 'n Pop! link to a graphical banner and also added that banner to a new options screen, so users might see the banner more than once per launch. With EBO in mind I've also updated the Flux icon for the 1.1 update to better reflect the "Liquid Fire" subtitle. The original icon was admittedly rushed and fugly.

I'll post an update once some more data is available but for now I can conclude that unrelated-but-free apps can certainly help the sales of paid apps, but only if the free apps get a ton of exposure themselves - and that's definitely not a guarantee.

Pretty graphs courtesy of the excellent folks at appFigures.com.