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

Success chart

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



To read a brief accompanying note to the scheme - welcome to cat.

Where is the money, Billy?

This is elementary - I need several million more than the cost of developing an application and the cost of marketing.

I - it turns out no less elementary, this is D (number of jumps) * H (monetization coefficient). We will talk about H separately, but for now we are worried about D. D is already 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 of installations

Organic traffic is the money that the application makes by itself, without special marketing activity. Let's look at this formula. B, C, and H are multiples, and they are also less than one. All they can do is not spread the audience. J at the expense of two-way communication is a potential philosophical stone, but about it later.

Remain A - the basic audience that we can get. These are not our customers, not even our visitors - these are just people who saw our sign. How can we influence A by increasing the number of views of our signboard? Obviously - 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 have not made it to the top at all, then you have only A4 left - and this is frankly small. Even with specially created "fake" applications in the spirit of Angry Zombies vs Alien Doodle Plants, we will be talking about several hundred views per 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.

The highest traffic at Total Free. Then - Total Paid. After - Top Categories. It’s important that the number of views drops proportionally depending on the location. Accurate statistics of “views” and traffic sources are Apple’s secret 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 a download bonus in relation to everyone else.
• Top 2-4 (6 iPad) - getting here means that every user who visits the AppStore will see our application. The traffic is very substandard, but there is a lot of it.
• Top 4-8 (6-12 iPad) - to see this page, the user must “leaf through” the application in the selected category. This immediately cuts off a huge part of users, but makes the traffic cleaner, as only those who at least think about buying something are browsing.
• Top 8-10 - Top 10 visible on a page in iTunes. And although the proportion of those who download from the program, and not from the device is not large, this is still a serious milestone.
• Top 10-100 - with each subsequent page, the number of users who see our application falls. Somewhere after the 20th place, the drop slows down, and the number of people viewing the page decreases not so much.
• Top 100-200 - below 100 places, to see the application it is already necessary to open the “watch all” link on the Iphone. Which once again reduces the audience (it’s one thing to flip, another is to tap on the link). After 200 places you fly out of the top of iTunes
• Top 200-300 - everything, we flew out of the iPhone tops and became invisible

Each page has its own number of downloads and purchases that must be made in order to pass a certain milestone.

Practical tips that can be made from the above:

Bad advice number 1

1. It makes no sense to fight for the upper boundary of the "frontier" - it is much cheaper to gain a foothold on the bottom. For example, 10th place in the Top Free in the entertainment category in the Russian App Store requires about 2,000 downloads per day. It will also give us a hit in the Top 100 overall. Climbing to 5th place will require about 5,000 downloads, while the number of views will increase slightly.
2. Top Grossing only works well within the first 10, since not many people want to specifically climb to see which application has earned more.
3. Search queries - they work simply, they give a small, but constant growth. We check the keywords in Google or Yandex for the number of requests and check in the App Store for the number of results. Since the user sees one application per page during a search query, it is not very happy to be one of 100.
4. Top 4 categories will give more views than the top 50 overall ratings. And in some categories the competition is not so high.
5. Rating on traffic quality (and the active user base and application monetization depend on it):

• Highest Quality Search Traffic
• Paid apps are better than Free
• In the category of higher quality than in Total
• The lower places of the rating are better than the high ones.
• If you believe the App Annie, to enter the top 100 free applications in the US for the iPhone, 13 thousand daily downloads are needed, and 54 thousand downloads to get into 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 the application is released is to throw it in TOP. Moreover, the higher we throw him - the larger the audience will see him. Given that the App Store takes into account the statistics of downloads for 3 days - 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 a wall on Facebook. Each of these messages 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 their own experience - the most effective publication on specialized sites writing about applications. For a quality review, E can reach 20% of the site’s audience. That is, if a site is visited by 100,000 unique visitors per day, a review printed on the main page will be viewed 20,000 times.

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

(F * F1) - traffic purchase

If you do not take illegal methods (botnets, etc.), then the price for installing (CPI) a free application starts at 10 US cents. However, in reality, the usual price for the US 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 the Total TOP 100 US and Top 10 US categories), we need 10 such reviews or 5 reviews and $ 20,000 to buy the installations. If you have connections, the application is beautifully made and it has a good idea - reviews will be written for you for a little money or for free. If all this is not there, then paid reviews will cost money comparable to buying installations.

Most publishers benefit from established contacts, a name (helps to get high-quality reviews) and low installation costs (as they use their own application audience and bulk purchase of installations).

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

Bad advice number 2

1. The lowest CPI is ads from native apps. Immediately think of how you will link your applications to each other to ensure high conversion.
2. The more interesting the idea, the greater the chance of a review.
3. All reviews, materials, etc. must be released within 3 days, which means that it is necessary to agree much in advance
4. 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
5. Ranking according to the degree of effectiveness of materials:

• Reviews
• Sales
• Contests
• Devstory
• News, Press Releases
• Banner advertising

In the next part:

• Great Appeal or Millionaire Girl
• Virality. Doctor, will I live?
• Monetization or egg broth

And for the sweet!

How much does it cost to create an application or the whole truth about money