But so what?
How do rankings affect sales? And how many sales equate to a ranking?
It's all about status:
There's something kind of cool about being able to say your app is ranked at number 9 in the UK Education chart - it adds credibility to your app and convinces users that other people have found the app useful enough to download it.
But how does that equate to sales?
Well, the best way for me to explain is to reveal a few figures... Let's start with the first day of sales for The Pocket Curriculum. We sold 45 copies. Now, in the world of paid-for apps, that's a fair amount. It's not Angry Birds... but it's a lot for a small independent software house with a limited market.
We waited anxiously for the charts to update. We entered at number 23 in the Education Chart.
The next day (which happened to be a Saturday) we sold an additional 70 copies. Our app didn't really move.
Why not? Well, there's a number of reasons:
1. App sales increase at weekends. So the apps above us were also selling more;
2. Rankings appear to take into account cumulative figures over the last few days of sales. So where we'd sold 45 and 70, other apps may have sold 30, 40, 45 and 71.
The cumulative aspect seems to give apps like ours a fighting chance.
It's a curriculum app. Most of our sales are to schools and teachers. Schools only buy apps during the week. Teachers tend to buy apps in the evenings and at weekends. This means our app has fluctuating sales patterns.
By using cumulative figures, it would take a few days of poor sales in a row to significantly affect our ranking.
Top Ten:
So we thought... get to the top 10 and everyone will see the app in the App Store and buy it.
Nope! Yes, it was cool to get there a few times. But none of the times have resulted in increased subsequent sales. The ranking has been the result of a sudden boost in sales built on top of good cumulative sales in the prior days. The ranking itself has not lead to more sales.
Social Influencers:
Without a doubt, the biggest influence on our downloads is endorsements from social influencers...
Particularly @MrThorne and @AlanPeat. Their endorsement of our app and retweets have lead to a 70% increase in sales on those particular days. Coincidence? Possibly. But it appears that having a respected educationalist recommend your app can have a massive impact.
Long Term:
The Pocket Curriculum is a one-time download app. You don't need to buy it again. You don't buy in-app purchases. It therefore stands to reason that at some point, our app downloads will plateau and then decline.
Schools buying in bulk through the educational purchase programme DO NOT affect rankings. One school bought 120 on one day. The app went down in the chart. Why? Because it sold an additional 30 on the same day so the overall sales were recorded at 31.
This is surely a good thing. It would be very easy to manipulate an app's ranking if you could buy it in bulk! Developers would rush to buy hundreds of copies of their own app just to get it up the chart!!
To be honest, it still remains a bit of a mystery to me...
But I think that's part of the fun!
Doug Stitcher
@TheRenegade78
The Pocket Curriculum is available from the App Store for 69p!
No comments:
Post a Comment