How to become a millionaire in the AppStore or a few formulas about promotion and sales. Part 1

Scheme of success

John, we lost two sheets of math! What to do?
As usual, Bill ... write: "From here it obviously follows ..."

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To read a non-concise accompanying note to the scheme - welcome under cat.

Where is the money, Billy?

This is elementary - it is necessary that I be several million more than the cost of developing an application and marketing costs.

I - it turns out no less elementary, this is D (number of races) * H (monetization coefficient). We will talk about H separately, but for now we care about D. D it turns out to be much more complicated.

D = (A1 + A2 + A3 + A4) * B * C * H * J + (E * E1) + (F * F1)

(A1 + A2 + A3 + A4) * B * C * H * J - Organic Traffic
(E * E1) - PR and Advertising
(F * F1) - purchase installations

Organic traffic is the money that the application earns by itself, without special marketing activity. Let's break this formula down. B, C and H are multipliers, besides they are less than one. All they can do is “not splash out” the audience. J due to two-way communication - a potential philosopher's stone, but then about him.

Remain A - the basic audience that we can get. These are not our customers, not even our visitors - these are only people who have seen our sign. How can we influence A by increasing the number of views of our sign? Obviously - by increasing D and I! Apple, without further ado, used a standard feedback loop.

A1 and A2 are the most accessible objects for management. If you do not hit the top at all, then you have only A4 left, which is frankly not enough. Even for specially created "fake" applications in the spirit of Angry Zombies vs Alien Doodle Plants, we will talk about several hundred views a day.

Yes, of course, do not forget to make a quality application, and we hope that Apple censors will notice it and we will get into A3.

Total Free has the highest attendance. Then - Total Paid. After - Top Categories. It is important that the number of views decreases in proportion to the location. Accurate statistics of “views” and sources of traffic are the secret of Apple behind seven seals, but, based on common sense, several lines are visible:

Top 1 - people are so arranged that they unconsciously prefer the best. Therefore, the first application always receives bonus downloads for all the rest.
Top 2-4 (6 Ipad) - getting here means that every user who logs in to the AppStore will see our application. The traffic is very poor, but there is a lot of it.
Top 4-8 (6-12 Ipad) - to see this page, the user must “flip through” the applications in the selected category. This immediately cuts off a huge part of users, but it makes the traffic more clear, since only those who are at least thinking about buying something will turn over.
Top 8-10 - Top 10 are visible on a page in iTunes. And although the share of those who download from the program, and not from the device is not great, it is still a serious milestone.
Top 10-100 - with each subsequent page, the number of users who saw our application drops. Somewhere after the 20th place, the drop slows down, and the number of people who view the page does not decrease so much.
Top 100-200 - below 100 places, in order to see the application it is already necessary to open the “watch all” link on the Iphone. That once again reduces the audience (one thing to flip through, another - tap on the link). After 200 places you take off from top iTunes
Top 200-300 - everything, we flew out of the tops of the IPhone and were not visible

Each page has its own number of downloads and purchases that must be done to pass a certain line.

Practical tips that can be made from the above:

Bad advice №1

It makes no sense to fight for the upper limit of the "boundary" - it is much cheaper to consolidate at the bottom. For example, 10th place in the Top Free in the entertainment category in the Russian App Store requires about 2000 downloads per day. It will also give us a hit in the Top 100 overall. Approximately 5,000 downloads will require a rise to 5th place, while the number of views will increase slightly.
Top Grossing works well only within the first 10, since it’s specifically to watch which application has earned more — not so many people want it.
Searches - work simply, give a small increase, but constant. Keywords are checked in Google or in Yandex for the number of requests and checked in the App Store for the number of issue. Since the user sees one application per page during a search query, it is not very happy to be one of the 100.
Top 4 categories will give more views than the top 50 overall rankings. And in some categories the competition is not so high.
Rating by traffic quality (and it depends on the active user base and monetization of the application):

Search traffic is of the highest quality.
In Paid applications, better quality than in Free
In the category of higher quality than in Total
In the lower places of the rating is better than in high.
According to App Annie, to enter the top 100 free applications in the US for the iPhone, you need 13 thousand daily downloads, and 54 thousand downloads to get to the top ten.

Launch into space

While we are not in the tops, A1 and A2 do not work. Accordingly, the first task that is posed when an application is released is to throw it in the TOP. Moreover, the higher we throw it - the greater the audience will see it. Taking into account that the App Store takes into account the statistics of downloads for 3 days - then this is exactly the time we have for everything about everything.

So, the primary task is to ensure getting into TOP.

When we just started the application, the formula is much simpler:
D = (E * E1) + (F * F1)

(E * E1) - PR and Advertising

Let's say you wrote an article, a review, a blog post, shouted on the wall on Facebook. Each message will be seen by a certain number of people - this is E. And some of them will follow the link to download the application - that’s E1.

According to numerous reviews and personal experience - the most effective publication on specialized sites writing about applications. For a qualitative review, E can reach 20% of the site’s audience. That is, if the site is visited by 100,000 unique visitors per day, the review printed on the main page will be viewed 20,000 times.

Excellent E1 (conversion) for a free application - 20%. Thus, a super-review on a popular site will give 4,000 races. For a paid application, E1 will be significantly lower (1% - 5% depending on the price and quality of the review).

(F * F1) - buying traffic

If you do not take illegal methods (botnets, etc.), then the price for the installation (CPI) of a free application starts from 10 US cents. However, in reality, the usual price for the United States is from 1 to 2 dollars, depending on the quality of traffic and the methods used.

To get 40,000 installations in the first three days (getting into Total TOP 100 US and Top 10 US categories), we will need 10 such reviews or 5 reviews and $ 20,000 for the purchase of installations. If you have connections, the application is beautifully made and it has a good idea - reviews will be written to you for a small fee or for free. If all this is not - then paid reviews will cost comparable with the purchase of installations money.

Most publishers benefit from established connections, a name (it helps to get high-quality reviews) and a low price of installations (as they use the audience of their own applications and bulk purchase of installations).

The important point is that all these 30-50 thousand dollars spent on PR, advertising and traffic purchase give a chance for the success of the application. They open the way to getting organic traffic, attract A - the audience, who will see the sign of our application.

Bad advice number 2

The lowest CPI is an advertisement from own applications. Immediately think how you connect your applications with each other to ensure high conversion.
The more interesting the idea - the greater the chance of a review.
All reviews, materials, etc. must go out within 3 days, which means you need to negotiate strongly in advance
It is better to have several suppliers of installations (Flurry, TapJoy, ChartBoost, Fiksu, etc.) - this will allow you to buy the required number of installations at a lower price.
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